Stay Updated!

The modernism of the preceding decades set the tone of Indian artistic practice in the late eighties and nineties. However, during this time, the concerns of the earlier part of the century had weakened by then and, for some younger artists, had even became a non-issue. The hard facts of disappearing borders and a globalised economy made post-modernism the preferred artistic mode. In keeping with the tenor of the times, photo and hyperrealism, installation art, new media creations, and digital representations found their way into Indian artistic and public awareness. The "hybrid mannerisms" which Jagdish Swaminathan vehemently criticised, ironically, began to seem normal and familiar.
Even as many of the earlier divides blurred, and the borders between imported and indigenous seemed to blend, some rough edges continued to show. During the 1990s, a pluralist and fragmentative mood dominated the creation of contemporary art, highlighting the difficulties associated with the dawn of an age of information and instant gratification, and with the emergence and novel concerns of 'the global Indian'. Dually charged by the excessive information they received and their personal responses to this environment, the work of artists like Shibu Natesan, Surendran Nair, Jayashree Chakravarty, Rekha Rodwittiya and G. Ravinder Reddy responded to newer and greater numbers of stimuli than any of their predecessors could have imagined.
With the old, outmoded dualities loosened, Atul Dodiya's metaphoric montages took cognisance of the space in which Indians found themselves face to face with other citizens of the world, while Subodh Gupta used his paintings and installations to filter and magnify the everyday experiences of rural and middle-class Indians for a global audience. In the work of Baiju Parthan, the past and the present cohered without dissonance in a new, digitized realm, and Anju Dodiya's personal struggles with the violence of the creative process were spelled out for viewers in her watercolours.
Like painting, contemporary sculpture evolved in accordance with new shifts in ideology and paradigm. Sculptors found that the only limits imposed on the techniques and materials they could use were those of their own imaginations. Traditional media like stone and metal were subjected to new treatments and unusual combinations, and inventive techniques like site-specific installations and kinetic sculpture gained popularity. In addition, boundaries between traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture were dissolved, with artists like Sudarshan Shetty, Anandajit Ray, Jagannath Panda and G.R. Iranna hybridizing the two through their practices.
With this contemporary wave came the opening up of the market for Indian art abroad, as also the profusion of art galleries within the country, meaning that the Indian artist now had no choice but to address a more diffuse audience, through themes that resonated with the local as well as the global. Today, the work of artists from the Indian diaspora, the blurring of design and art, and the videos, installations and digital spaces of an even younger generation of artists have all added new dimensions to Indian contemporary art, a seemingly nebulous concept ever-receptive to growth and change.
Through the trials and tribulations of its practitioners, Indian art has yielded a picture of a vital and vigorous creative practice over the last century. It is this frequently bewildering heterogeneity, this multiple and plural nature of Indian art which, perhaps, will eventually deliver up the insights its practitioners continue to pursue so dedicatedly.