Bhajju Shyam’s book, The London Jungle Book , is a depiction of Shyam’s experience of London, where he spent two months painting tribal motifs on the walls of an upmarket Indian restaurant Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book is a bit like an earthquake. All it may suggest is a mild tremor, but deep below…
A single piece, 100 feet long and 10 feet wide scroll depicting a postmodern melangé of disparate images, objects, figures and ideas: Noah’s menagerie, domestic animals and birds, Biblical stories, fairy tales, popular proverbs and saws, rickshaw painting and characters from popular fiction and movies, Einstein, Dracula and Batman, to mention just a few— Archaeology…
Shako, the Bangla word for the makeshift bridges made of bamboo or wood that hang perilously over canals and streams, is also used positively to signify friendship. How aptly, then, has the word been appropriated by the Women Artists Association of Bangladesh to represent their coming together from time to time to popularize women’s art…
The National Exhibition organized by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is the annual showcasing of the most recent work done by Bangladeshi painters and sculptors. This year the panorama of 246 works by some 200 artists at the National Art Gallery in Dhaka has been a good harvest but not without raising questions about the choice…
Following the East India Company’s rise to political power, an array of European painters, portraitists, miniaturists, engravers and lithographers came out to India. Like the British and European Merchants they sought fortune, fame and adventure. They were not disappointed in their pursuits as they made good money by painting portraits, both in oil and water,…
The great Scottish-Italian sculptor and graphic artist Eduardo Paolozzi offers an uncompromising vision of the contemporary West and its violent and superficial culture Now that the Irishman Francis Bacon is dead, the Scottish-Italian Eduardo Paolozzi, his friend and (in part) disciple, must, in his eighties, be the most imposing living artist from the British Isles.…
The 1970s was a critical period in modern Korean history, marked by economic advancement and political repression, and a protective attitude towards cultural legitimacy. The situation influenced the art forms of the time. Thus monochrome painting came to be practised and was considered an aesthetic product in Korean formalistic modernism The central topic in any…
A multi-faceted artist, a humanist, and an outspoken intellectual, born in the ancient town of Behera in Upper Egypt on the lush Delta of the Nile, the artist Adel El-Siwi is a well seasoned man; he has lived in diverse parts of the world, explored the winding path of art, and exhibited on every continent.…
Recent Sri Lankan art history encounters only a few turning points in its evolution. One is when a group of artists instigated modernist thought in Sri Lankan art fusing art concepts of Paris based modernism with local aesthetics and anxieties in the 1940s. The other is when H. A. Karunarathne presented American Abstract Expressionism within…
Zubeida Agha, an abstractionist with a singular vision, stirred up a storm of controversy with her debut show in 1949. A significant departure from conventional art, her exhibition gave Pakistan her first whiff of modernism. Agha’s oeuvre in the subsequent years added momentum to the modernist initiative and paved the way for others. Working within…
