Akar Prakar

Save the Date | Friday, 19th January, 2024 | 6 PM onwards

We are thrilled to announce the opening of our next exhibition, 'Bare Liminal', a group show curated by Sidhhi Shailendra at Akar Prakar Kolkata on 19th January, 2024.

Featuring Artists:

Arhant Shrestha
Debasish Mukherjee
Debiprasad Bhunia
Jayashree Chakravarty
Manir Mrittik
Pulak Sarkar
Saurav Roy Chowdhury
Supriyo Karmakar

Opening Reception: Friday, 19th January, 2024 | 6 PM Onwards

Exhibition Dates: 20th January – 17th February , 2024 | 2 pm - 7 pm

📍Akar Prakar, P-238
Hindustan Park, Kolkata

For any further information or press related enquiries, please contact us at [email protected] or call +91 11 4131 5348

Carte blanche à Manish Pushkale Une installation monumentale, délicate et poétique sur l’inexorable disparition des cultures autochtones en Inde

Last Day to visit !

Exhibition - "Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"


🗓 2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

📍Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

📢 Closing Soon

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

The act of stitching is a vital aspect of Leang Seckon's life connected to his birth. As the artist describes, during the bombings, when his mother was pregnant with him, it was the heavy-skirt of his mother that saved him.

The sole skirt that she was wearing and to which she kept adding weight by stitching scraps of clothing found near her was what protected him when their town was bombed. The story is often presented and narrated through his performance.

Installation : The Universe of his Mother’s Skirt.

Exhibition
🗓 2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

📍Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Zooming into the detailed intricacies of "Nest" by

Swipe left for more ➡️

"Nest" by Jayashree Chakravarthy portrays the vision of "home" as a realm devoid of human intervention. Layered with earthy and organic materials, the work
manifests as a free-flowing, maze-like structure inspired
by the intricate and intuitive processes observed in natural species

Currently on view at MIRROR/MAZE: echoes of song, space, spectre.
📍KNMA Saket.

Important Notice 📢
Akar Prakar, New Delhi, and Kolkata will remain closed from Saturday, 30th December 2023 to Monday, 1st January 2024.

Happy holidays ! 🤍
Team - Akar Prakar
#2024

Akar Prakar sends everyone best wishes for this Christmas🎄 and the coming New Year !✨️

Image details : Jamini Roy | Mary and Jesus with four Apostles | pen & ink on paper | 4.5x7 inch | 1

In his generation of painters, Ganesh Haloi’s practice distinctly stands out for his commitment to abstraction, though he began his artistic training in academic realism,
and later undertook the ambitious project of appropriating/painting the composition of the dense narrative frescoes at Ajanta for the National Museum in Delhi.

Ganesh Haloi was born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh, presently a part of Bangladesh, in 1936.
He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the partition. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work as it did on some other painters of his generation. Since then, his art has exhibited an innate lyricism, coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world.
In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Craft.

Sculpture : Ganesh Haloi | Composition-IV | Bronze | 8 x 15 x 2 inches | 2016

Zooming into the detailed intricacies of "Looking through" by

Swipe left to see the full artwork.

Akar Prakar is glad to announce the representation of contemporary Cambodian artist Leang Seckon in India.
Working with the medium of collage and canvas, he often stitches the found material from magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers with textile elements into the composition.

Image details : Leang Seckon | Looking through | 43 x 41 inch | Mixed media on canvas | 2023

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Manish Pushkale has created a work representing the inexorable disappearance of the Great Andamanese indigenous people through natural disasters, tourism, and
globalisation. The paper used by the artist is natural, irregular, ill-treated, repaired, holey, and coated with several layers.
It bears cracks, has black and red tones from basalt stone and ochre, and is covered in mineral pigments from rocks taken from different geological layers in the Andamans. While a lattice pattern punctuated with marks, bubbles, and spots creates the imaginary geographical structure of a forgotten distant civilisation, a group of successive and regular black and white dots evoke a binary language or
musical notes. Elsewhere, open or closed lines symbolise the fundamental questions faced by the native populations of the Andaman Islands: should they open up to the world or isolate themselves?



In partnership with Akar Prakar

The exhibition is supported by The Advitya & Kanika Dewan Foundation and ITM-University Gwalior( ).

"Carte Blanche à Manish Pushkale""
🗓️From October 18, 2023, to March 4, 2024
📍 Musée Guimet, Paris

This artist's travels to China and Japan resulted in printmaking techniques, which became integral to the pedagogic practices of Kala Bhavana. He had brought back with him various ukiyo-e prints and wood blocks.

Stitching and weaving have since been an integral part of Leang Seckon's artmaking. Reimagining the boundaries of social, political, and environmental exchanges, his paintings and collages are a convergence of the happenings in and around him both from the past and the present. With material collected from cities and places, he visits around the world, inhabiting the spaces and cultures, and the works are a culmination of these experiences.



Image Details : Leang Seckon | Who owns the land | Mixed media on paper | 23 x 26.5 inch | 2023

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

When we met Ganesh Haloi ( ) first in 2004, as young gallerists, we were a new entrant in the art world, but he embraced us just as a magnanimous guru embraces young naive learners.
As our interactions with him became frequent, our understanding of art also grew with it. In his gentle and soft-spoken manner he convinced us to visit Benaras and Ajanta, the two places in India which, according to him, have inspired the best of Indian artists and art. This, for us, was a turning point, not only in the way we viewed Indian art but specifically Ganesh Haloi's abstractions.

The collection of his works in this book is spontaneous and effortless, and to my mind, a gentle shift from his earlier works. It is remarkable to see Haloi evolving in his art works even at the age of 86. We admire him for his continued practice and the transformative and meditative quality of his art. However chaotic the world may seem, his paintings never fail to touch the silence within.

This book is an attempt to put together short writings on and by Haloi, so that the reader too can discover and experience his world and art through it.

Reena & Abhijit Lath
Directors, Akar Prakar
🔗 Visit the link in the bio to purchase this publication.

Lalu Prasad Shaw was born in 1937. He graduated in Fine Arts from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata. He has won many scholarships/awards, including 1971 National Award, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi 1978, 76 Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata. He has exhibited extensively in and outside the country since 1956; some of his solo & group exhibitions are: CIMA Art Gallery, Kolkata, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata, Dhoomimal Art Gallery, New Delhi, Art Heritage, New Delhi, Sarala Art Gallery, Madras, Arts & Print Gallery, Kolkata, British Biennale, London, Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh, Norwegian Print Biennales.

Shaw is well known for his greatly stylized portraits of Bengali women and couples. He lives and works in Kolkata.

Follow the link in the bio to shop the print on our website!

Untitled by Lalu Prasad Shaw
Serigraph
Size: 16.5 x 11.75 inch
Edition Number: 47/50
Year: 2002

Exhibition : Poetics of Abstraction by Ganesh Haloi
2018

Nature and its hidden dynamics has been the constant muse for Haloi. His early works from the period of 1998-99 have been distinctly symbolic and are animated expressions of nature delineated in thick linear forms encompassing space and movement bearing subtle impressions of Kandinsky’s linear compositions. More peculiar is the work ‘Yoga and Meditation’ painted in the year 1998, which directly connotes the Benares Ghats with its linear compositional perspective reminiscing that of an Indian miniature painting.

Conceptually, the three levels or ghats might also resonate with the levels of consciousness that one attains with the practice. Furthermore, if you allow a streak of imagination to break away from the obvious narration and observe, each level then represents itself as a mirror image of the other. Not exact but as angular reflections, off one to the other, an attempt to create an infinity of images that transcends time and dimension. It’s interesting to note that the only images that are not reflected are the man at the bottom and the bicycle along with the words at the centre, philosophically drawing the relation between man and the cosmos. The man represents the static element of life and can experience the cosmos in its ever-changing infinite dimensions through yoga and meditation. Not by renouncing life but by balancing both. Thus the cycle and the title take centre stage in the composition.

Influenced by his personal history, Seckon’s practice has been deeply autobiographical with intimate narratives of his childhood memories often juxtaposed with social and political commentaries and pop culture references.

Working with the medium of collage and canvas, he often stitches the found material from magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers with textile elements into the composition.
Stitching and weaving have since been an integral part of his artmaking. In the densely painted compositions of his visually abstract canvases like Wish for Protection and Old is New, he uses leather and the ‘reverse-stitch’ to create works reminiscent of modern southeast Asian sensibility merged with elements of folk figuration.



Image Details : Leang Seckon | Wish for protection | 55 x 51 inch | Mixed media on canvas | 2023

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Here are a few glimpses of our current exhibition at Akar Prakar, New Delhi.

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024
11:00 am -7:00 pm

Akar Prakar
D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Remembering Gopal Ghose on the occasion of his 110th Birth Anniversary.

Born in Shyambazar (Kolkata), Gopal Ghose spent his childhood and adolescence shifting between Shimla, Benares and Allahabad. In 1931, he enrolled as a student at the Maharaja School of Art & Craft, Jaipur, under the guidance of Sailendranath Dey, from where he obtained his Diploma in Painting in 1935. Beginning with a pictorial language that was inspired by the latter, Gopal Ghose’s work transformed during the 1940s; his sketches of the infamous man-made famine of 1943 and the paintings executed during his association with the Calcutta Group testify his shift to a more contextually relevant pictorial diction. During the early 1940s, he taught at the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Kolkata, before he joining the Government School of Art, Kolkata, where he taught till 1972.

Gopal Ghose’s art received critical attention from Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Stella Kramrisch. In 1956, he was one of the participants in a collective project involving designs by contemporary Asian artists engraved on Steuben Crystal, which were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer, and breathed his last on 30th July, 1980.

Image Details: Gopal Ghose | Untitled | Mixed media on paper | 10.25 x 6.5 inches

Artist C Douglas's works currently on view at the exhibition "THE MOVING ARCH: Artistic Encounters in India(1940 onwards)" at Lalit Kala Academy by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art on the occasion of Madras Art Weekend.

Repost

Yesterday marked a truly beautiful experience as we inaugurated "THE MOVING ARC: Artistic Encounters in India (1940s onwards)" at Lalit Kala Academy on the occasion of Madras Art Weekend.

This was the very first time that KNMA presented vignettes from its museum collection to Chennai, showcasing more than 150 works tracing the artistic trajectory of Indian artists.
If you're in Chennai, don't miss the chance to view this exhibition in person!

🗓Nov 30 - Dec 22,2023|11 am -7 pm
📍Lalit Kala Academy, Chennai

Remembering the Maestro Nandalal Bose on the occasion of his 141st Birth Anniversary.

Born in Kharagpur, Bihar in 1882, Nandalal Bose was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art and a significant figure of Contextual Modernism. He became the Principal of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1921 and taught some of the greatest artists of the 20th century including K.G. Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij and Satyajit Ray, to name a few.

He was recognized not only for his paintings and murals, and his role as a pedagogue but also for his postcard drawings, the renderings of plays by Rabindranath Tagore, and for his designing and ex*****on of the venues of the Indian National Congress conventions in Lucknow, Faizpur and Haripura from 1935 to 1938. Although he had already gained international recognition as a modern artist, his association with Gandhi elevated him to the position of a national icon.

Moreover, he was entrusted with the task of designing and illustrating the original manuscript of the Constitution of India, creating 22 unique illustrations depicting scenes from India's historical and cultural past. In 1954, he was honored with the Padma Vibhushan award.

Nandalal Bose passed away on 16th April, 1966, at the age of 83 in Calcutta.

Image Details : Nandalal Bose | Untitled | Ink and brush on postcard | 5.5 x 3.5 inches | 1948

✨Thank you to all who joined us at our space in Delhi !

These are some of our favorite snapshots from the opening of our exhibition "Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom” at Akar Prakar, Delhi with a with a special performance by the artist and Deepika Bisht, a professional Odissi dancer at 6:30 pm.

"Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024 | 11-7 pm

D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Born in a warzone in Cambodia in 1970, artist Leang Seckon spent his childhood during a violent period in the country’s history of the covert US Air Force bombing operation for the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge (1975 - 79). Growing up during the Rouge, he witnessed the atrocities of the regime and the suffering caused by them.

Influenced by his personal history, Seckon’s practice has been deeply autobiographical with intimate narratives of his childhood memories often juxtaposed with social and political commentaries and pop culture references.

Join us today for the opening of our exhibition, "Leang Seckon: The weight of Freedom" with a special performance by the artist and Deepika Bisht, a professional Odissi dancer at 6:30 pm.

Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom

Opening Preview
Friday, 1st December, 2023 | 6 PM

Exhibition
2nd Dec 2023 - 6th Jan 2024 | 11-7 pm

D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Artist Leang Seckon's works
were exhibited in Dar Lean (2022) at documenta fifteen with the Sa Sa Art Projects, an artist run initiative in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

An archive of the localities and mohallas of Benares is silk printed on the frames of rice paper and handmade paper in these works in the year 1781, these names were documented and many of these places continue to retain their names.

Mukherjee’s practice is an investigation into the relationship between objects, architecture, and our memories.


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Save the Date | Friday, 1st December, 2023 | 6 PM

Akar Prakar presents "Leang Seckon: The Weight of Freedom"

With a special performance by the artist with Deepika Bisht

Join us for the preview at Akar Prakar, New Delhi, between 6-8 pm.

D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi

Ganesh Pyne, an Indian painter and draughtsman was born in Calcutta in 1937. Pyne is one of the most notable contemporary artists of the Bengal School of Art, who had also developed his own style of "poetic surrealism", fantasy and dark imagery, around the themes of Bengali folklore and mythology.

After graduating from Art College, Pyne made a major decision of not going in for a full time job and commenced his artistic career in the early 1960s, as a book illustrator and a sketching for animation films at Mandar Mullick's studio in Kolkata. In 1963, he became a member of the newly-formed Society of Contemporary Artists. His early work was deeply influenced by the Bengal school and especially Abanindranath Tagore was in water colour. The 1970s were the painter's important period, he had moved to water colours, in a tumultuous period of anger and despair in Bengal that found expression in his art. Pyne started as a watercolourist in the Bengal school mode, and gradually shifted to gouache and finally to tempera, for his subsequent abstract and surrealist work period, in ochre, black and blue shades.

Image Details : Ganesh Pyne | Untitled | Mixed media | 7.25 x 8.25 in | 1979

Artist Jayashree Chakravarty's Nest is currently on view at the exhibition at KNMA Saket.

Repost

“Nest” by Jayashree Chakravarthy portrays her vision of “home” as a realm devoid of human intervention. Layered with earthy and organic materials, the work manifests as a free-flowing, maze-like structure inspired by the intricate and intuitive processes observed in natural species.

Currently on view at MIRROR/MAZE: echoes of song, space, spectre.

📍KNMA Saket.

[Jayashree Chakravarty, Nest, 2022-2023, Cotton fabric, natural fibres, puffed rice, stains, dry leaves and grasses, tea and coffee paste, synthetic glue and copper wire, Courtesy: Artist]

Day 1 | Akar Prakar at ArtMumbai

Visit Akar Prakar at
Booth no. 48 at the Art Mumbai 2023 to catch a glimpse of our artists in Mumbai !

Featuring Artist :
Debanjan Roy
Debasish Mukherjee
Ganesh Haloi
Manish Pushkale
Meera Mukherjee
Prodosh Das Gupta
S.H. Raza
Sarbari Roy Choudhury
Somnath H**e

Nov 16 – Nov 19, 2023

📍 Booth 48, Art Mumbai ( )
Mahalaxmi Race Course
Mumbai

Looking forward to meeting you at Art Mumbai!
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