EXHIBITION ( Painting ) "Metropolis & The Self" Group Show of Seven Artists at Art Alive Gallery, Panchsheel Park - 22nd to 30th August 08

• Time : 11:00 am - 7:00 pm

• Event Details : Art Alive Gallery presents 'Metropolis and The Self' A group show of seven Artists who are Apurva Desai, C. F. John, Debraj Goswami, Pratul Dash, Murali Cheeroth, T. M. Azis, Veer Munshi.
• A metropolitan city is ever in the process of making, surpassing all vertical and horizontal limits of progress, outgrowing the existing systems, breaking legendary records, bringing newer ideas to wither away the old ones. In such hustle-bustle an individual is exposed to multiple attractions and opportunities only to grow lesser and lesser central to the idea of progress and development. The show unravels the multiple layered interaction of the Self with the fast changing Metros.
• Sixty one years down the line, the nation’s dream of urban development is now true for many more cities other than the four cardinal cities; faced with newer challenges in the light of new age globalization, late capitalism, terrorism and environmental issues. The show captures the dialogue between the Self and the Metro spaces by bringing together artists who come from smaller cities to metros and where each work battles between the
• familiar ideas of their smaller native cities with the exposure of wide diversity witnessed
• in the metros.
• Displaying unusual flavors of a metro city life experience are artists – Apurva Desai, C. F. John, Debraj Goswami, Pratul Dash, Murali Cheeroth, T. M. Aziz and Veer
• Munshi reacting to their surrounding socio-political situation, environmental crises and abundant knowledge. On one hand, where the cities are developing urban lifestyle and manner, these are also faced with newer challenges in the light of new age Globalisation, Late Capitalism, Terrorism and Environmental Issues.
• The Artists have for long been grappling with their experience of urban spaces and the chosen works explore the receptor’s position. The works enquire in multiple aspects of marginalisation, spatial and relational segregation, alienation and detachment, profusion and temptations. The relationship between the people and the metro cities is not simple but one with jumbled emotions of sorrow and happiness. This show unearths several layers of such urban existences.
• Like the large human bodies in the works of Apurva Desai, who’s known as an urban landscapist, have imposed concrete structures and machines that bring forth the brimming experience of urban existence. Here the human may appear large but its actions are saliently compelled by the mechanical city pattern. C. F. John works on the other hand are engrossed in the meditative act of restoring self space, as he puts it: “Let the Beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” [Versions of Rumi – Open Secret]. T.M. Azis, alternatively, distorts the human form by the liquefying the image, converting viewing into an exercise. Here one has to search for the simple forms hidden in the canvas, parallel to the experience of looking for internal childlike innocence that is often missing in an urban manner.
• Debraj Goswami’s works remark over the way knowledge operates in the midst of excessive information. In photo realistic manner he uses key masters of Art – Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso and Van Gogh, who have contributed greatly to the tradition of Art but are popularly known for reasons other than their works. He says, “They have information without indulgence”. Murali Cheeroth’s city fossils, too focus on the whole new knowledge that a city produces, yet his works uniquely present the mental image of those
• objects, structures and facilities as icons stressing on the spatial and relational segregation practiced in the metros.
• Metropolis as magnetic and proactive cultural and commercial center attracts internal and global attention. The works of Pratul Dash convey his concern for the exploitation caused to the under privileged sectors by juxtaposing a fish bowl that was once full of life is sucked only to create city of inert pipeline and construction. He also questions the militant authority of certain identity groups that assert inheritance rights over urban territories. Shrapnels by Veer Munshi takes account of the aftermath of destruction that too has become part and parcel of life. Having migrated from Srinagar, that now has a history of terrorism, he see no place unaltered by it and so his works take a strong stand against dehumanisation by building the surface area with multiple scattered remains that was once part of functional city and is then blasted into unidentifiable scrap. A lonely shoe or the running away boy in the forefront belong to no specific group or individual but is representative of the alienated and dislocated humanity.

• Place : Art Alive Gallery, S-221 Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017

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