"Conversations Collaborations Transformations" an exhibition of artworks by Manisha Jha & Gautam Bhatia at Visual Arts Gallery, IHC, Lodhi Road > 1st-7th October 2010

Time : 
1st October : 6:30 pm - Opening
2nd to 7th October : 10:00 am - 8:00 pm - Exhibition on View

Entry : Free

Place : Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre ( IHC ), Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003
Parking : Gate No. 1 to 3 ( Cars ), Gate No. 2 ( Bikes & Bicycles )

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Area : Lodhi Road Area Events
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Event Details : 'Conversations Collaborations Transformations' an exhibition of artworks by Manisha Jha and Gautam Bhatia.                  
Dr. Alka Pande will be curating a special exhibition showcasing the spirit and times of contemporary India. The works reflect the presence of tradition and modernity in contemporary India.
The two artists, Manisha Jha and Gautam Bhatia who share an academic training of architecture and fine art, have crossed boundaries in their respective practices.
Manisha Jha – She is a self-taught artist and has come from a community of women folk who have been practicing art during festivals and ceremonies for generations. When her family moved to Delhi, Manisha completed her schooling and a Diploma in Interior Designing and Display from the New Delhi Polytechnic for Women. She then graduated in architecture from the Institute of Environmental Design, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat. Along with her professional degrees, she continued her self-learning process in Madhubani painting. Her educational career promoted new dimensions within her paintings. In 2009, her work was selected to be part of “Aspects of Collecting”, an extraordinary art project on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria.
She has been using the traditional technique of line painting, which was learnt from her mother and grandmother. Each form is broken into smaller forms with lines of different thickness and intensity. Her knowledge of architectural rendering has enhanced her skills. For each painting she takes a year to finish the line work. For filling the background, she uses her fingers and hands to create different textures. Forms in her paintings are two-dimensional. She uses the traditional ‘kalam’ i.e. nib and holder for doing her work.
Gautam Bhatia - Graduated in Fine Arts and went on to get a Masters degree in Architecture. A Delhi-based architect, he has received several awards for his drawings and buildings and has also written extensively on architecture. Besides a biography on Laurie Baker, he is the author of Punjabi Baroque, Silent Spaces and Malaria Dreams – a trilogy that focuses on the cultural and social aspects of architecture. The Punchtantra - a rewriting of the original Panchatantra into contemporary folk-tales and Comic Century, An Unreliable History of the 20th Century were published by Penguin India, while Whitewash: An Unkind View of India and its Makers was released in May 2007. Two recent shows of drawings and sculpture entitled Looking Through Walls and The Good Life examined disparities between the professed goals of architecture and the public perception of building. Bhatia is currently working on Below the Horizon – A City Underground, a project of drawing and ideas.
As an architect, Gautam Bhatia often tried to formulate and construct aspects of beauty in building. But because the overwhelming cultural mood is of despair, he has more often failed. In writing too, he realized that the more enduring aspects of modern Indian life were its ugliness. Not the ugliness of squalor and poverty, which can’t be helped, but the tendency to visual clutter and contamination. Art too had become less about inventing a future, but celebrating the present; its original purpose of representation stood undermined.
He feels the ability to draw doesn’t qualify him as an artist, but it allows him the opportunity to collaborate with others more skilled than himself. To piece together situations that maybe part sculpture, part graphic, part installation he frames his drawn ideas in another dimension and in the mixing of media project images that reflect this confusion of our times.
The collaboration with two other artistic skills – the traditional miniaturist and the fiberglass sculptor - so is meant to reflect something of these pleasures, pretensions and excesses. As with the theme there are no boundaries with techniques. The pieces combine sculpture in fiberglass with painting, miniature painting with written text, and wood sculpture with painting.                                   

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