Two art shows are happening on the ground floor, at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery. Gallery A has works of Remya R.S., her first solo show. She's doing her MFA at Hyderabad and in Gallery B, a group show, called ‘Aksham: A passage through Various Axiz'.
Alternate view
Remya's show, titled ‘Way-Getaway', has acrylics, dry pastels and girlie subjects like a kitchen view, complete with the coconut scraper which is in flames, just where the woman sits to scrape coconuts!
Beside the scraper is a country oven. One interesting title is ‘Me, Myshelf', where you see a shelf, and the view is from the top. All kinds of vessels, in rows, packed into the frame, is another stamp of her style.
Remya uses the washbasin for a variety of things, in her works, unlike you and me, like putting in a sleepy dog and growing fish. The deeper meanings lie within the artist and the more imaginative of the viewers.
Everyday things like a letterbox, which is slowly fading into history is also part of her oeuvre. In one frame, it's a smart little box, freshly painted with the letters clear. In another frame the letter box broken and drifting away in the water.
The group
The group show in Gallery B has five artistes participating, Arun Raj M, Girish Raman Kallely, Dr K. P. Jayashankar, Sajeesh P.A. and Satheesh K.K. Sajeesh and Satheesh have put up 20 plus works while the other three have fewer works on show.
Mask like faces abound in Jayashankar's frames, while Girish has some text as well in his works, to accentuate his message. Arun's deep purples, saffron and greens fill his canvases, the figures, both animate and inanimate.
Sajeesh has put up paintings in fairly big sizes as well as drawings in big ad small sizes. His paintings are bold statements with sharply demarcated colour zones and figures while his drawings are conventional in their delineation, but subjectwise, very contemporary.
One painting, that of a man's legs under the table, with no man in the canvas, and objects like an apple with the knife in between, has its continuation in a painting in bright colours, complete with the man's legs and a full apple, crying for perhaps yet another painting to complete the series.
Satheesh also has a set of small frames with pastel colours and small complicated figures, the subject and style contemporary, mixing delusions and reality, modernity and the traditional, seeking yet another plane for the evolving thoughts of an artist.
Both shows are representative of the emergence of a group of artists which is daring enough to come into their own, imbibing freely and without any inhibitions what they like about the more established ones and infusing it with their own artistic vocabulary.
Group shows where artists can exhibit their works, even if they have a few only, are encouraging, for many cannot wait patiently till they have a gallery full of works to show the world the result of their artistic urges.
The shows are on till May 31.
