Lotus, Bhils and pure art

If you visit the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Fort, you’ll find large painted murals on canvas sharing space with sculptures, etchings, drawings and illustrated books. Some works comment on the plight of the marginalised in urban Delhi. Others feature drying lotus ponds, women dancing on a full moon night and the Bhils living in villages around Udaipur. This versatile oeuvre belongs to the acclaimed, New Delhi-based 84-year-old artist A Ramachandran. It comes together in the exhibition titled A Ramachandran: 50 Years of Art Practice, supported by the New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery. Conceptualised by art historian R Siva Kumar, the show displays 260 works done by the artist between 1968 and 2019. “It’s not easy to show an artist like Ramachandran, who makes mural-scale paintings and multi-figure sculptures, without a certain kind of space being available. While there have been solo exhibitions of Ramachandran’s work in Delhi, Bengaluru and Kochi, he hasn’t shown in Mumbai on an appropriate scale. It has been made possible with NGMA Mumbai deciding to host this exhibition,” says Kumar.

17 May 2019