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For a more holistic view of Mohan Samant’s practice, ‘Archaeologist at the Ancient City’ includes a selection of five works on paper. While Samant used watercolors throughout his career, he turned to the medium with increased vigor in 1974 after a heart attack left him unable to work on large-scale canvases. He played with texture by adding linear patterns with felt-tip marker and cut-paper appliques to layers of transparent watercolor. He had another period of exceptional watercolor output in the 1990s. Works such as ‘The Gossipers’ (1998) show Samant’s deft hand mixing delicate washes of color with swaths of opaque paint and felt-tip marker embellishments.

‘Archaeologist at the Ancient City’ is open at Aicon through September 21.

Photo 1: Mohan Samant, ‘The Gossipers’ (detail), 1998, Watercolor on paper, 50 x 35 in.

Photo 2: Mohan Samant, ‘Bird Flight,’ c. early 1980s, Watercolor and cut paper on paper, 40 x 29 in.

Photo 3: Mohan Samant, ‘Impending Storm’ (detail), 1998, Watercolor on paper, 52 x 35 in.

Reminder | Join Aicon to celebrate the opening of ‘Archaeologist at the Ancient City,’ a retrospective of the late Mohan Samant (1924-2004), and ‘Requiem,’ the first solo exhibition of the Indian Expressionist painter Lancelot Ribeiro (1933–2010) in New York. The reception is this Thursday, August 15, 6-8 pm.

There will be a short performance by Kamel Boutros and Jillian Samant during the opening reception (6:45 pm). Kamel is the Music Director of the Parish of Calvary-St. George’s in NYC. He was a baritone soloist at the Metropolitan Opera for 6 seasons and has performed several concerts with the legendary pianist Martha Argerich. Jillian, a musician and widow of Mohan Samant, will be reading from letters written by her late husband.

RSVP to [email protected] or by direct messaging this account.

Left: Mohan Samant, ‘Mrutya Smruti: Dance for the Ancestors’ (detail), 1987, Acrylic, oil, sand and wire drawings on canvas, 55 x 72.5 in.

Right: Lancelot Ribeiro, ‘Frolic on a Nuclear Playground’ (detail), 1965, Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 32.5 x 50.4 in.

Aicon is delighted to announce ‘Requiem,’ the first solo exhibition of the Indian Expressionist painter, Lanceloté José Belarmino Ribeiro (1933–2010) in New York. The exhibition presents a selection of works drawn from Ribeiro’s six-decade career, with the earliest from 1962—the year of his leaving India for a new life in London—to the latest in 2004. ‘Requiem’ is presented in collaboration with 108 Art Projects India.

Ribeiro was born in Bombay to a Roman Catholic family from Goa. F.N. Souza was his older half-brother and the two, from childhood, would remain close. Ribeiro would witness his brother’s career emerge and the formation of the Progressive Artists’ Group whose members were welcomed into the family home. He was schooled at St. Xavier’s in Mumbai in the 1940s, but it was the troubled experience of two years boarding at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Rajasthan, run by Irish Christian Brothers which, he described, set his “beginning as an image maker.”

Over his career, Ribeiro held nearly 70 solo and group exhibitions across India, UK, Paris, Germany, Chicago, and San Francisco. He participated in exhibitions alongside his brother, which included ‘The Arts of India’ at the Towner Art Gallery (1966) and ‘Five Indian Artists’ (1976) organized by Maria Souza’s ARTS 38. His last major solo exhibition was a retrospective at Leicester’s Museum & Art Gallery (1986), which showcased his work from 1960–1986. He would return to India for one last exhibition in 1998, 30 years after he had left.

All works included in ‘Requiem’ are directly from the Artist’s Estate.

Photo 1: Lancelot Ribeiro, ‘Stricken Monk with Cat O’Nine Tails (Psychedelic Man Series)’ (detail), 1968, Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, 71 x 49.8 in.

Photo 2: Ribeiro in Belsize Park (1968).

Photo 3: Lancelot Ribeiro, ‘Large Red Head (Awaiting Revelation)’ (detail), 1966-68, Acrylic, polyvinyl acetate, crayon and collage on architecturally drawn paper, 46.7 x 32.9 in.

Aicon is pleased to announce ‘Archaeologist at the Ancient City,’ a retrospective of the late Mohan Samant (1924-2004). The exhibition charts his dynamic practice from the early 1960s through 2003 with examples of his heavily textured surfaces from the 1960s and 70s, three-dimensional paper cut-outs starting in 1975, intricately hand-bent wire figures and cut niches that appeared in the 1980s, and finally, the expert melding of these canvas expanding processes in the 1990s and 2000s. Alongside important canvases highlighting Samant’s unique idiom is a collection of watercolor-based works on paper from the 80s and 90s.

Mohan Samant (b. Bombay, 1924; d. New York City, 2004) was an early Indian modernist painter and a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). He received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1952. Samant had several solo shows with his New York representative, World House Galleries, and was included in major group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1956), the touring ‘Trends in Contemporary Painting From India’ (1959-60), ‘Contemporary Indian Painting 1973’ (1973, Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.), ‘Contemporary Indian Art’ (1982, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK), and ‘The Progressive Revolution’ (2019, Asia Society, New York). In addition to his art practice, Samant was a skilled musician who favored the sarangi (an Indian bowed instrument). He often held concerts in his Flatiron loft with his wife, musician Jillian Samant. Samant’s artworks are held in prestigious collections including the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai, India), Picker Art Gallery (Colgate University, NY), Tate (London, UK), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY).

‘Archaeologist at the Ancient City’ is presented in collaboration with Jillian Samant and Abraham Joel.

Photo 1: Mohan Samant, ‘Killing of the Mythical Bird’ (detail), 1980, Mixed media and paper cutouts on a textured background, 46 x 46 in

Photo 2: Mohan Samant in his studio

Photo 3: Mohan Samant, ‘Hoxenthop,’ 2003, Acrylic, oil, plaster, wire, and mixed media on canvas, 45 x 45 in

CLOSING TOMORROW | ‘Achuthan Kudallur: A Cloud of Flowers’ & ‘Delicately Does It’

Aicon’s summer exhibitions close June 29. Visit the gallery between 10 am and 6 pm for your last chance to view these fabulous shows.

Note, Aicon will be open by appointment only between July 2 and August 14. Please email [email protected] to set up a viewing.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

Closing out our series of ‘Delicately Does It’ artist features, we have Sathi Guin. Sathi Guin was born in India in 1979 and completed her BVA and MVA in Painting at the Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, India. She sees her expressive line work as extensions of the lines of her hand, illustrating her past, present and future. The delicacy of Guin’s fine-line brushwork is reinforced through her use of watercolor, an inherently diaphanous and fluid medium. The final composition is determined by the meditative process of repetitive mark-making. This spontaneity highlights the importance of the making process and encourages personal interpretation of the works rather than a pre-ordained meaning. Guin had her first solo exhibition, ‘Portraits of Intimacy,’ at Akara Art in Mumbai in 2022. She currently lives and works in Vadodara, India.

Sathi Guin’s works are on display at Aicon through next Saturday (June 29).

Photo 1: Sathi Guin, ‘Drawing in black 9’ (detail), 2019, Watercolor on paper, 55.5 x 94 in.

Photo 3: Sathi Guin, ‘Untitled’ (detail), 2024, Watercolor on paper, 9 x 5 in.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

Next up in our series on artists from our ‘Delicately Does It’ exhibition: IMAGINE. IMAGINE (aka Sneha Shrestha, b. 1987) is a Nepali artist whose style is recognizable by her combination of Sanskrit scripture aesthetics with contemporary graffiti. Her artworks range in size from intimate works on paper to massive outdoor murals around the world. Shrestha is the first contemporary Nepali artist to be acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is also represented in the collections of Meta (Facebook), Google and Fidelity Investments. Alongside her artistic practice, Shrestha is an educator and social entrepreneur. She established Nepal’s first Children’s Art Museum to provide a creative space where children and youth can develop skills through project-based art experiences. In the US, Shrestha is the Arts Program Manager at the South Asia Institute at Harvard University.

IMAGINE’s works are on display at Aicon through June 29.

Photo 1: IMAGINE, ‘Untitled red (1),’ 2023, Acrylic ink on handmade Nepali paper, 30 x 20 in.

Photo 3: IMAGINE, ‘Untitled red (3)’ (detail), 2023, Acrylic ink on handmade Nepali paper, 30 x 20 in.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

“Abstraction, to me, is not a spoof of reality, but a disembodied reality. When I touch colour I have no bargain with the semblances of the world. Semblances used to fascinate me once. From my experience in both an earlier figurative phase and the abstract phase later, I have found colour behaving like the edges of a flame. This rapacious nature of colour poses new challenges.

Can I harness and contain it in a new sense of order, which was not there before and to which I am solely responsible? Can I work against the tonalities of colour and the static nature of the medium simultaneously by annihilating the real space and creating a new pictorial space? How best can I provide a colour with the shape it cries for in the midst of other colours also crying for such shapes? Can I make the space more resonant and more animated with fewer and fewer such shapes? Above all and most important, in so doing, what amount of my flesh, my blood has got into these bright patches of colour I held in the tranquillity of my mind?”

Achuthan Kudallur, ‘A Decade in Colour,’ Fifth One Man Show

‘Achuthan Kudallur: A Cloud of Flowers’ is on view through June 29.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach. Archival photography courtesy of Ashvita’s.

Continuing on in our ‘Delicately Does It’ artist series, we have Safdar Ali Qureshi. Safdar Ali Qureshi (b. 1980 in Larkana, Pakistan) specialized in miniature painting when studying fine art at the National College of Art in Lahore. After graduating in 2005, Qureshi began experimenting outside the confines of miniature painting with narrow color palettes and abstract compositions. His paintings are now characterized by his dashes and use of monochromatic schemes. Qureshi’s works are a direct response to his experiences, capturing his memories in swirling and overlapping layers. In addition to his art practice, Qureshi teaches miniature painting at SABS University of Art, Design and Heritages Jamshoro, a short distance from his home in Hyderabad. He has been featured in solo and group exhibitions around the world.

These works are on display at Aicon through June 29.

Photo 1: Safdar Ali Qureshi, ‘Untitled’ (detail), 2024, Gouache on wasli paper, 20 x 25 in.

Photo 3: Safdar Ali Qureshi, ‘Untitled,’ 2024, Gouache on wasli paper, 20 x 26 in.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

For the sixth artist feature in our ‘Delicately Does It’ series, we will highlight the works of Waqas Khan. Waqas Khan (b. 1982 in Akhtarabad, Pakistan) is a graduate of the National College of Arts in Lahore. Though trained in printmaking, Khan went on to cultivate his own minimalist ink style: precisely placing thousands of small dots and lines on paper to create large, abstracted webs and celestial bodies. Often made imperfect with deliberate denseness or impurities, his webbed structures come together as an organic whole. Inspired by Sufi poets and Mughal miniature paintings, Khan’s largescale ink drawings on canvas invite moments of pause and reflection. He was shortlisted for the prestigious Jameel Art Prize in 2013. Khan’s works are found in the collections of The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Deutsche Bank Collection, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

You can view these magnificent works in person at Aicon through June 29.

Photo 1: Waqas Khan, ‘Convolute,’ 2024, Ink on canvas, 60 x 60 in.

Photo 3: Waqas Khan, ‘This’ (detail), 2024, Ink on paper, 30 x 20 in.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

Next in our ‘Delicately Does It’ artist feature series: Yasi Alipour. Yasi Alipour is a Brooklyn-based Iranian writer and artist who uses intricate paper folding techniques to create interactive works of art. Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989, Alipour received a BS in Computer Science at the University of Iran in 2011, a BFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in 2015, and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2018. Though primarily expressing her ideas through innovative paper folding processes, her work is expansive and spans sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, writing, and lectures. She explores themes of home, displacement, migration, political instability, language, and mathematics, drawing on her personal experience as a Middle Eastern q***r artist fluctuating between a life in the United States and Iran.

You can see these works in person at Aicon through June 29.

Photo 1: Yasi Alipour, ‘Losing Language’ (detail), n/d, Fold, paper with toner, 31.5 x 20.5 in.

Photo 3: Yasi Alipour, ‘Measuring a Mountain,’ n/d, Fold, cyanotype on black sulphite paper, 38 x 39 in.

Photo 4: Yasi Alipour, ‘ﻭ’ (detail), n/d, Fold, cyanotype dyed with lahijan tea, 11 x 8.25 in.

Installation photography by Sebastian Bach.

For the fourth feature in our ‘Delicately Does It’ artist series, we will examine the works of Ghulam Mohammad. Mohammad’s (b. 1979 in Kachi, Pakistan) art explores his cultural identity in both a historical and contemporary context through a unique textual mixed media: intricate collages featuring individually cut Urdu letters pasted onto wasli paper. His experience struggling to acquaint himself with Urdu after growing up in Balochistan, where combinations and pronunciations of basic letters are so different, seemed to make the cultural gap between himself and the society in which he was trying to settle that much more difficult to bridge. By eschewing legibility in favor of surface texture, Mohammad’s work creates a new visual language that raises questions about absence and erasure. Mohammad currently works as a senior lecturer of Fine Arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, where he graduated with distinction in Fine Arts in 2013. In 2016, he became the first Pakistani artist to win the Jameel Art Prize from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

These works are on display at Aicon through June 29.

Photo 1: Ghulam Mohammad, ‘Untitled’ (detail), 2023, Iranian ink & paper collage on wasli, 4 x 6 in.

Photo 2: Ghulam Mohammad, ‘Untitled,’ 2022, Iranian ink & paper collage on wasli, 6 x 4 in.

Photo 3: Ghulam Mohammad, ‘Gunjaan (Jam-Packed)’ (detail), 2019, Iranian ink & paper collage on wasli, 5.5 x 4.5 in.

Photo 4: Ghulam Mohammad, ‘Saraab I (Mirage),’ 2019, Perforated pages, 12 x 15 x 3.5 in.

Continuing on in our ‘Delicately Does It’ artist series is Youdhisthir Maharjan. Maharjan (b. 1984 in Kathmandu, Nepal) received his undergraduate degree in creative writing and art history from New England College and an MFA in conceptual printmaking from the University of Idaho. His creative processes are laborious and repetitive; they investigate the balance between identity and anonymity, familiar and other, signified and undefinable. Maharjan states that the final forms of his work are beyond his control, using found materials and an autopoietic process that lets the piece create itself. Drawing from a wide array of sources ranging from Tibetan thangka painting to Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot,’ he emphasizes the materiality of text, devoting himself to ritualistic, absurdist processes rather than their outcome.

You can see these works in person at Aicon starting tomorrow, May 23 through June 29.

Photo 1: Youdhisthir Maharjan, ‘A Book of Silence,’ 2024, Hand embroidered book strips on woven reclaimed book pages, 15.25 x 19 in

Photo 2: Youdhisthir Maharjan, ‘A Book of Silence’ (detail), 2024, Hand cut text collage reclaimed book pages, 26 x 56.5 in

Photo 3: Youdhisthir Maharjan, ‘A Book of Silence’ (detail), 2024, Incense burned reclaimed book pages, 53 x 20.75 in

Photo 4: Youdhisthir Maharjan, ‘A Book of Silence,’ 2024, Hand cut, reclaimed book pages, 15.25 x 19 in

Next up in our series on artists from ‘Delicately Does It:’ Zarina Hashmi.

The work of Zarina Hashmi (1937-2022), most commonly known on a first-name basis, reflects themes of home, memory, and displacement: themes informed by her personal life. Hashmi’s interest in architecture and background in mathematics is reflected in her use of geometry and her emphasis on structural purity. The starkness of her minimalist works is softened through her choice of materials, particularly thin sheets of handmade paper. Zarina’s primary focus was printmaking, including intaglio, woodblock, lithography, and silkscreen. She was also known for creating paper pulp sculptures and experimental works in bronze, aluminum, steel, wood, and tin. Zarina was the Indian representative in the 2011 edition of the Venice Biennale and was honored with a solo show at the Guggenheim in 2013 titled ‘Paper Like Skin.’

You can see these works in person at Aicon from May 23 through June 29.

Photo 1: Zarina Hashmi, ‘Refugee Camp,’ 2015, Collage with Indian handmade paper on printed black BFK light paper, 26 x 19 in

Photo 2: Zarina Hashmi, ‘Blue Night’ (detail), 2017, Collage with strips of Indian handmade paper stained with Sumi ink on Arches Cover buff paper, 30 x 9.25 in

Photo 3: Zarina Hashmi, ‘Untitled,’ 2012, Collage with pewter leaf on etching mounted on Arches cover buff paper, 15 x 15 in

Reminder | Aicon’s Spring 2024 exhibitions will be opening next Thursday, May 23. In the ground floor galleries will be ‘A Cloud of Flowers,’ the first solo exhibition of Achuthan Kudallur (1945-2022) in New York. On the second floor we present ‘Delicately Does It,’ a group exhibition featuring works by Yasi Alipour, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sathi Guin, Zarina Hashmi, IMAGINE (aka Sneha Shrestha), Waqas Khan, Youdhisthir Maharjan, Ghulam Mohammad, and Safdar Ali Qureshi.

‘A Cloud of Flowers’ & ‘Delicately Does It’ will be on view May 23 - June 29, with an Opening Reception on May 23, 6-8 pm.

Left: Sathi Guin, ‘Untitled’ (detail), 2024, Watercolor on paper, 40 x 27 in

Right: Achuthan Kudallur, ‘Untitled’ (detail), n/d, Oil on canvas, 41.54 x 47.44 in

Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting the wonderful artists that will be featured in our upcoming ‘Delicately Does It’ showcase. This week, we will be begin our series with distinguished Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922-2019).

Farmanfarmaian had an exceptional career spanning more than sixty years, which included a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2015, the first for an Iranian artist. She moved to New York from Iran on two occasions: once to study art in the 1940s and again decades later when her husband was declared an enemy of the Islamic Revolution, and they went into exile. Farmanfarmaian’s practice fused the concepts of American Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism and the principles of Islamic geometry. Her epiphany as an artist occurred during a visit to the Shah Cheraq Shrine in Shiraz during the interval between her New York moves. She is noted as saying that this experience was like “stepping inside the center of a diamond and staring at the sun.”

Farmanfarmaian’s practice included traditional reverse glass painting, mirror mosaics, sculpture, and installation. For this exhibition, Aicon presents a selection of her kaleidoscopic drawings in combinations of colored pencil, felt-tip pen, glitter, and marker on paper that fuse the principles of Islamic geometry with the minimalist shapes of Western abstraction.

You can see Farmanfarmaian’s works in person at Aicon from May 23rd through June 29th.

Photo 1: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, ‘Nomadic Tent (Chador 6),’ 1977, Mixed media, 13.75 x 16.9 in.
Photo 2: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, ‘Circle in Hexagon’ (detail), 2014, Felt-tip pen on paper, 39.6 x 29.5 in.
Photo 3: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, ‘Untitled,’ 2015, Marker, glitter & colored pencil on paper, 27.5 x 39.4 in.
Photo 4: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, ‘Untitled’ (detail), 1977, Felt-tip pen on paper, 16.5 x 11.75 in.

Images courtesy of James Cohan Gallery. Photography by P. d’Heurle.

Aicon is pleased to announce ‘A Cloud of Flowers,’ the first solo exhibition of Achuthan Kudallur (1945-2022) in New York. From his early expressionist figurative paintings of the 1970s through his abstract canvases of the 2000s, the exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of the career of this significant force in India’s contemporary abstract art movement.

Born in Kerala in 1945, Kudallur became a prominent figure in the Madras Art Movement after joining the famed Arts Club in the 1970s at the behest of his friend Mohan Rao. While Rao would bail on the classes before they even began, he had already paid Kudallur’s fees, so Kudallur stayed. What Kudallur would find at the Madras Arts Club was an outlet for his creative spirit that had been dulled by an education in engineering. Before engineering and before Madras, Kudallur dreamed of being a writer so he took classes with the goal of illustrating his stories. Instead, he found a love for painting that became the central focus of his life. He continued to work as a civil engineer in public works in Chennai until he could sustain himself as an artist. When he died in 2022, his home in Thiruvanmiyur was stacked to the rafters with canvases.

Kudallur’s chromatic symphonies are on view in the main floor galleries from May 23 through June 29.

Aicon is proud to present ‘Achuthan Kudallur: A Cloud of Flowers’ in collaboration with Ashvita’s.

Photo 1: Achuthan Kudallur, ‘Untitled,’ n/d, Oil on canvas, 21.8 x 25.9 in.

Photo 2: Achuthan Kudallur in his studio.

Photo 3: Achuthan Kudallur, ‘White,’ 2002, Oil on canvas, 31.7 x 34 in.

Who should we celebrate this AAPI Heritage Month? According to Artsy Editorial, it’s Aicon artist Natvar Bhavsar! Mimi Wong writes:

By the age of 19, Natvar Bhavsar was teaching drawing in his home state of Gujarat. His early exposure to Indian crafts came from his family’s textile-printing business, while his formal education included studying traditional painting and large-scale murals. Though he abandoned realism, the vibrant hues and sensual shades that surrounded him during those formative years remain ever-present in his work.

In the 1960s, Bhavsar arrived in New York City, where his instinctual approach gained recognition alongside other Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko. His paintings shift freely from blocks of color to organic bursts and layered compositions, revealing his origins’ influence. For example, his particular technique of sifting powdered pigments onto the canvas to create elaborate patterns using different, brightly colored powders is influenced by the festive Indian tradition of rangoli. Thus, a lifetime of artmaking has brought Bhavsar full circle.

Be sure to read up on Bhavsar and the other celebrated artists at artsy.net.

Aicon exhibition photography by Sebastian Bach.

Aicon is pleased to announce ‘Delicately Does It,’ a group exhibition that focuses on the work of several artists who have spent their careers mastering their craft in impossibly complicated and intricate ways, primarily on and with paper. For these artists, paper can be both surface and medium, fragile, and impervious. Through precise actions such as cutting, folding, etching, and dying, the artists manipulate the materiality of paper and demonstrate its various properties while allowing their labor-intensive language to develop. Oftentimes meditatively repetitive and meticulous, these works thrum with ritualism and geometry. ‘Delicately Does It’ is about the spontaneous artistic processes and journeys artists embark on without knowing where they might conclude. The more you look at these works, the more you are pulled into their intimate worlds of wonder and curiosity.

‘Delicately Does It’ features works by Yasi Alipour, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sathi Guin, Zarina Hashmi, IMAGINE (aka Sneha Shrestha), Waqas Khan, Youdhisthir Maharjan, Ghulam Mohammad, and Safdar Ali Qureshi. It will be on view in the second-floor galleries from May 23 through June 29. More details coming soon!

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, ‘Untitled (Calligraphy 10),’ 1980 (detail). Image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery. Photography by P. d’Heurle.

Congratulations to Aicon artist Faiza Butt for her inclusion in ECC Italy’s seventh edition of ‘Personal Structures’ in Venice! This year’s exhibition is guided by the title ‘Beyond Boundaries,’ and Faiza’s selected canvases perfectly reflect the theme of “investigating what is beyond in order to see it from a different point of view.” In Faiza’s Phantasmagoric series of paintings she has created a fantasy menagerie: a natural space where exotic birds co-exist in what appears to be utopian harmony, but upon closer inspection are not quite as idyllic as we are led to believe.

In Butt’s words: I want to remind my audience that no matter how close the imagery is to nature or our recognizable surroundings, once translated into a painting, they remain fantastical and ‘unreal’. I have dedicated the narratives in this body of works, to the natural world and its wonders. I hope my works draw the audience in, with seduction of beauty, skill and scale, and then deliver the bigger message of climate, consumption and our collective responsibilities towards our global village.

Photo 1 (left): Faiza Butt, Phantasmagoric 3, 2022, Oil on board, 49.6 x 26 in, Private Dubai Collection
Photo 1 (center): Faiza Butt, Phantasmagoric 4, 2023, Oil on board, 49.9 x 26.3 in, Private UK Collection

Photo 2 (right): Faiza Butt, Phantasmagoric 1, 2022, Oil on board, 48 x 96 in, Aicon, New York

Venice photography courtesy of the Artist. Aicon exhibition photography by Sebastian Bach.

The Aicon team is excited to announce the inclusion of B. Prabha’s ‘Waiting’ in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Devika Singh writes:

B. Prabha was born in a village near Nagpur in the state of Maharashtra and first trained at the Nagpur School of Art before moving to the J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), a city in which she would settle with her husband, the artist B. Vitthal. Female characters recur throughout Prabha’s paintings. Intimate in tone, the scenes she depicts are often set in everyday rural contexts. Among these, ‘Waiting’ offers a striking rendition for its daring use of green. Its intense, emerald shade, worked in oil paint, merges background, flora, and the loincloth of the female figure. Time seems suspended as a result. In a slight three- quarter pose, the figure ostensibly turns the back of her slender, elongated, and half-naked body to the viewer. Staring into the distance, her left profile reveals refined features but also a saddened gaze, that of the woman waiting.

Today marks the centenary year of Francis Newton Souza’s birth.
 
As one of the founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 – along with M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, and others – Souza led the charge of the Indian modernist art movement. He was the only Indian artist to be included in Tate Modern’s group exhibition on 20th century modernism in 2002.

Shortly before the completion of this head painting in 1964, Souza remarked “I started using more than two eyes, numerous eyes and fingers on my paintings and drawings of human figures when I realised what it meant to have the superfluous and so not need the necessary. Why should I be sparse and parsimonious when not only this world, but worlds in space are open to me? I have everything to use at my disposal” (Artist statement, FN SOUZA, exhibition catalogue, London, 1961).
 
F. N. Souza, Untitled (Head), 1964, Oil on board, 30 x 24 in, Private NY Collection.

Photo of Artist by Ida Kar, Copyright @ National Portrait Gallery, London.

Writer Allie Biswas on Youdhisthir Maharjan’s artistic practice:

“Rather than focusing on the meaning of the written word, Youdhisthir Maharjan works with language in order to contemplate notions of productivity. His collages, made from pages removed from English-language publications, are an exercise in repetitive labor, in which the artist erases and highlights words in accordance with elaborate systems he devises. It is this meditative approach that establishes a sense of achievement for Maharjan rather than the finished collage itself.”

Excerpt from “Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art,” Phaidon Press, London 2024, pages 156-157 (illustrated). The book is available worldwide starting tomorrow, get yours at phaidon.com.

Maharjan’s works will be featured in “Delicately Does It,”, opening at Aicon on May 23.