An exhibition of recent artworks by Mehlli Gobhai at Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony > 11am-7pm on 8th September-5th October 2011
Time : 11:00 am - 7:00 pm
Event Details : Gallery Espace presents recent works by Mehlli Gobhai
This September, Gallery Espace is delighted to present Mehlli Gobhai’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi. One of India’s leading abstractionists, Gobhai was born in Mumbai in 1931, and educated at the Royal College of Art, London, as well as the Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for several decades before choosing to return to Mumbai in the late 1980s.
Gobhai’s practice is distributed across painting, drawing, and objects that mediate between painted surface and sculptural volume. Deeply contemplative, his work combines an architect’s linear precision with a sensualist’s richness of surface. It is situated within an evolving transcontinental lineage of abstractionism that includes Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Lucio Fontana. As critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote writes, Gobhai’s paintings are “suggestive of cool metal, burnished leather, weathered stone or the edge of luminosity signing a margin of reassurance against the dark... they seem to offer their viewers a temporary reprieve from the frenzied music of life.”
Gobhai’s practice ascends to the beauty of abstraction, but that beauty is achieved through a highly physical interaction with its medium. “Gobhai’s approach to his art is profoundly material, artisanal, workmanlike,” writes Hoskote. “His paintings, whether on paper or canvas, are built up like palimpsests, through the successive application, removal and addition of layers of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, zinc and aluminium powder, and pastel.... A surge of primal energy crests in every one of Gobhai’s paintings: a continuous, percussive energy that collides with his picture surface; and which he shapes, with a geometer’s instinct for measure, into a system of modular forms.”
Gobhai has held numerous solo exhibitions (most recently, in 2007 and 2011 with Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai; in 2004, the Bombay Art Gallery organised a monographic exhibition of 20 years of his work, titled ‘The Prism of Darkness’). Gobhai’s work has also been exhibited in many group exhibitions, including ‘Marking Black’ (curator: Madeleine Burnside, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1980), ‘Hinged by Light’ (curator: Ranjit Hoskote, Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1994), ‘A Global View: Indian Artists at Home in the World’ (curator: Bernhard Steinruecke, Fine Arts Resource, Berlin, 2000), ‘Crossing Generations/ DiVerge: 40 Years of Gallery Chemould’ (curators: Geeta Kapur & Chaitanya Sambrani, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2003), and ‘Nasreen Mohamedi, Mehlli Gobhai, and Zarina Hashmi’ (Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2006).
Related Events : Paintings & Drawing Exhibitions | Exhibitions
Entry : Free
Place : Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony, New Delhi - 110025
Venue Info : galleryespace.com | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Lajpat Nagar'
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Venue Info : galleryespace.com | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Lajpat Nagar'
Set Attending / Not Attending status below :
This September, Gallery Espace is delighted to present Mehlli Gobhai’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi. One of India’s leading abstractionists, Gobhai was born in Mumbai in 1931, and educated at the Royal College of Art, London, as well as the Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for several decades before choosing to return to Mumbai in the late 1980s.
Gobhai’s practice is distributed across painting, drawing, and objects that mediate between painted surface and sculptural volume. Deeply contemplative, his work combines an architect’s linear precision with a sensualist’s richness of surface. It is situated within an evolving transcontinental lineage of abstractionism that includes Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Lucio Fontana. As critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote writes, Gobhai’s paintings are “suggestive of cool metal, burnished leather, weathered stone or the edge of luminosity signing a margin of reassurance against the dark... they seem to offer their viewers a temporary reprieve from the frenzied music of life.”
Gobhai’s practice ascends to the beauty of abstraction, but that beauty is achieved through a highly physical interaction with its medium. “Gobhai’s approach to his art is profoundly material, artisanal, workmanlike,” writes Hoskote. “His paintings, whether on paper or canvas, are built up like palimpsests, through the successive application, removal and addition of layers of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, zinc and aluminium powder, and pastel.... A surge of primal energy crests in every one of Gobhai’s paintings: a continuous, percussive energy that collides with his picture surface; and which he shapes, with a geometer’s instinct for measure, into a system of modular forms.”
Gobhai has held numerous solo exhibitions (most recently, in 2007 and 2011 with Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai; in 2004, the Bombay Art Gallery organised a monographic exhibition of 20 years of his work, titled ‘The Prism of Darkness’). Gobhai’s work has also been exhibited in many group exhibitions, including ‘Marking Black’ (curator: Madeleine Burnside, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1980), ‘Hinged by Light’ (curator: Ranjit Hoskote, Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1994), ‘A Global View: Indian Artists at Home in the World’ (curator: Bernhard Steinruecke, Fine Arts Resource, Berlin, 2000), ‘Crossing Generations/ DiVerge: 40 Years of Gallery Chemould’ (curators: Geeta Kapur & Chaitanya Sambrani, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2003), and ‘Nasreen Mohamedi, Mehlli Gobhai, and Zarina Hashmi’ (Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2006).
Related Events : Paintings & Drawing Exhibitions | Exhibitions
An exhibition of recent artworks by Mehlli Gobhai at Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony > 11am-7pm on 8th September-5th October 2011
![An exhibition of recent artworks by Mehlli Gobhai at Gallery Espace, 16 Community Centre, New Friends Colony > 11am-7pm on 8th September-5th October 2011]()
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Wednesday, October 05, 2011
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