Wacky watercolours

Raghava KK has been his own best invention. The Bangalore born artist who started very young as a cartoonist before careening off to fame and fortune in Boston, is someone who dares.

In an earlier phase he enjoyed crawling and walking over large swathes of canvas leaving imprints of his hands and sneakers in brilliant patches of paint that teasingly resolved themselves in images. There has always been an autobiographical element in Raghava’s work. Earlier on, his canvases revealed his passionate identification with Netra, his companion and later his wife, or images collected during their travels together. The couple’s most exhilarating collaboration has been with their young son, Rudra, born to them a year or so ago. Curator of the show at the Ashivta Gallery in Chennai, Ashvin Rajagopalan, says: “The works developed through a process of free-form thinking and reflect ideas of matrimony and parenthood.” In brilliant patches of water colours with quirky pen drawings that ‘bleed’ onto the white sheets of handmade paper, they are Raghava at his satirical best, oozing pride at being a father contemplating his son’s poop!

— Geeta Doctor

Raghava KK
14 th Jan 2010
Ashvita Gallery, Chennai

Calendar Girl

How do you better a master? Photographer Rohit Chawla sidesteps that question in his exhibition that opened yesterday in New Delhi’s Visual Art Gallery. Chawla is inspired by Gustav Klimt, whose painting “Adele Bloch Bauer” was bought in 2007 for US$135 million, making him one of the most expensive artists of the last century. Chawla uses photography to replicate a painting, making the resulting artwork, different yet similar to its primary point of inspiration.

Commissioned by the Bird Group for the four hotels that they are developing across the country, Chawla put in extra effort to re-create all the props. He says, “When you replicate an artist, you want to do it as closely as possible to his original work.”

The photographs will be seen in a calendar and Chawla quips, “We take our calendar art seriously and don’t do models in bikinis.”

— Archana Jahagirdar

Rohit Chawla
Jan 15 to 20, 2010
Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Garland of thorns

An overwhelming sensation of being circumscribed permeates all of Anju Dodiya’s works at “Necklace of Echoes”, her first solo in Delhi, at Vadehra Art Gallery’s Okhla space, in a long time.

Faces, all women, peep sadly out from behind a “necklace” — or is it a noose? — a snaking rope , a piece of streamer, the round arch of a chandelier, a walled fort-like structure or a garland of chopped fingers. The necklace is, of course, a much favoured motif of Mumbai-based Dodiya, one of India’s senior most artists, and she has used it through her career to signify both life, as adornment, and death.

There’s drama inherent in all of the paintings, a tragic intensity that spills over into blood in “Falling Glass”. But it’s a quiet drama, underscored by the delicate finesse of the watercolour wash. The figures, we’re told, are self-portraits, and the paintings projections of “the artist’s subjectivity, trapped by its own constructs, aching for release”.

The wellspring of the pain in Dodiya may be autobiographical, but it’s an emotion that all her viewers — women more perhaps? — will find echoes of in their life.

— Gargi Gupta

Anju Dodiya
Jan 18 to feb20
Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi