TOUCHED BY THE SUN
Paramjit Singh
12 – 30 December 2021
Shridharani Gallery
Triveni Kala Sangam, 205 Tansen Marg, Mandi House, New Delhi
Open all days | 11 am - 7 pm
For further details, contact: art@vadehraart.com | +91 11 24622545/46103550
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Paramjit Singh titled Touched by the Sun from 12 – 30 December 2021, at Shridharani Gallery, New Delhi.
Featuring eighteen works rendered in oil on canvas, Touched by the Sun runs the gamut of Singh’s quintessential explorations of nature but importantly moves his impressionist vocabulary into the realm of abstraction. Singh studies the colours of fall in New York City over two years, the behaviour of flora and fauna in bloom on his walks in Delhi’s Sunder Nursery, and also the personality of water as it punctuates foliage as a lifegiving force strongly yielding to its own existence. Through abstraction, he departs from using nature as a stage or scene. Instead, using pigments as language, Singh captures the cyclical movements, instincts and persistence of nature to overwhelm and pacify the seeker or observer. His compositions eschew concept for colour, his dominant visual language, as he takes to handling pigments as material much like a sculptor handles their clay.
Posited in conversation with each other, Singh’s canvases comprise of skeletal views of bountiful tree tops along with bashful rivers, untrodden forest paths, a phantom breeze and effervescent pond scum. He maneuvers through elemental colours, applying them in three to five layers to achieve a drama of textures and deep shadows. He weaves strokes in a vibrant palette, including both an unexpected white and a saturated pink borrowed from his wife and fellow artist, to articulate nature’s own ecstasies – how it reacts to the atmosphere, to weather and light, to a human touch that remains present even through its absence. These large-scale works persuade us of the grandeur as well as the intimacy of nature, and become reminiscent of the spiritual encounters propelled by such interactive parlances. These harmonious composites argue the nature of nature as vast yet personable, asymmetrical yet balanced, returning us to Singh’s fundamental belief in the human spirit’s natural quest for freedom.
Touched by the Sun is a nostalgic yet hopeful new body of work by Paramjit Singh that brilliantly articulates the eternalness of nature in time as endurance, as memory and as visual storytelling.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paramjit Singh had his first solo show at the Triveni Gallery, New Delhi, in 1967, and has had numerous solo exhibitions since. Singh’s most recent shows include Paintings and Drawings at Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi, 2017; Shifting Terrains, Talwar Gallery, New York, 2014; Shall Return Again..., Centre for International Modern Art (CIMA), Kolkata, 2009; Green Thought, Bodhi Art, Singapore, 2008; and shows at Grosvenor Vadehra, London, and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007. Singh’s work has also been shown in many group shows, some of which include Progressive to Altermodern, Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2009; Modern and Contemporary Indian Art, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2008; and Inventing/Inverting Traditions: Indian Art II/III, Grosvenor Vadehra, London, 2006-07.
He was awarded Gaurav Samman by Government of Punjab in 2017 and Kalidas Samman by Government of Madhya Pradesh in 2019.
The artist lives and works in New Delhi.
ABOUT VADEHRA ART GALLERY
Established in 1987, Vadehra Art Gallery is among the most well-respected art galleries in India representing a roster of artists spanning four generations. Modern masters like M.F. Husain, Ram Kumar, S.H. Raza and Tyeb Mehta find prime spot in the gallery’s calendar alongside the subsequent generation of modernists like Arpita Singh, Nalani Malani, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Rameshwar Broota. VAG’s contemporary programme includes some of the most exciting names in Indian art such as Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, Anju Dodiya, N.S. Harsha, Jagannath Panda, as well as young emerging talent. As a key artistic interlocutor to audiences in India the gallery expanded its exhibition programme in 2007 to exhibit important names from the international contemporary art scene. Since then VAG has exhibited works of significant international artists including Yoko Ono, Wolfgang Laib, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Vadehra Art Gallery ventured into publishing in 1996, finding a crucial need for adequate documentation, critical writing, and quality reproduction of images. In the last two decades the gallery has published hundreds of illustrated exhibition catalogues, and several important artist monographs, some in collaboration with international publishing houses, Prestel and Penguin.
