Seven artists with different styles, perceptions are jointly holding an exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery. The works by the artists evoke considerable interest because there are, in quite a few of them, imaginative, provocative concepts. The forms used to build the compositions are also unusual. For instance, Amit Khanderao Patil uses small honey bottles and crackers (Laxmi Crackers) as forms. The result is very good. Narasimha Kumbar has the shadow of a hefty man standing behind a big-mouthed fish. Title: Self-fish. There are two huge works by Manjunath Lakshman. “In the Moment” is a splendid painting showing a man trying perhaps to cope with the actualities of a city. What the artist tries to say in the painting is not important. The visual impact itself is enough to place this as a work of great merit. Sunil Lohar has paintings in which there seems to be endless horizons. And in the “Strange World”, he has got a large number of scenarios, some of which tell a story. We see his great capacity for visualization as he brings dozens of images onto the canvas and places them in an extraordinarily balanced way. In the “Right Choice” by Santosh Andani, we see a huge naked man with an arrow-like piece pointing towards two different destinations.
Pavan Kumar’s “Pushp” is a good work. It is a sort of still-life. From a red pot starts a plant with flowers and foliage shooting up in a wonderous manner. He has also another piece “My Home”, - a small dwelling in the midst of huge space. The man in girish Kulkarni’s paintings looks like having thick hair – like an animal. In one of the paintings he is holding a bow and arrow with a tiger moving away from him.
The artists are calling their show “Self and the City”. They are trying perhaps to find a connection to a city that does not care and with which they are not comfortable. They have come to Mumbai after presenting their paintings at Bangalore and Hyderabad. The show is at Jehangir Art Gallery.