More the merrier

In the world of duplicity, everything is considered fake — except art. An actual canvas often becomes the mouthpiece for an artist's truth. To provide this experience to all the residents and art lovers of the capital, an exhibition called ‘Master Stroke 2019’ is being organised at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre.

The exhibition displays 30-to-40 artworks by a large number of artists — 31, to be precise — and takes you through each one’s unique journey and phases of aesthetic formulations. A diverse range of techniques, mediums, and configurations have been used. Sulu Mathew, Sailesh Sanghvi, Jaya Laxmi, Chandana Bhattacharjee, Darshan Sharma and Deepika Bedi Puri are some of the participating artists.

Master Strokes signifies the best of everything. The theme of the exhibition is simply ‘art where art is true’. It also aims to showcase how artists are tied with achieving perfection and their love for their creations. Talking about the challenges of putting the exhibition together, curator Kishore Labar says, "One of the main challenges that I faced was during the collection of artwork. You will find that there are different kinds of artwork in Master Stroke — figurative, abstract, semi-abstract, realistic, hyper-realistic, pencil, charcoal, black and white, colour, etc. I wanted artworks from different areas. So, it was a challenge getting all this together."

By Sanjay Chakraborty

Despite the large number of artists, everyone has a unique body of work. For instance, Kamal Devnath, a self-taught artist, presents abstract renditions of his surroundings. While realism is evident in his paintings, the way the figures are juxtaposed against each other is what the viewer would find most astounding. On the other hand, Vatsala Khera’s work, in pen and paper, derive inspiration from historical structures.

One of the artists, Sulu Mathew, describes her series — “It was rendered by pen on paper and it is a visual representation of my childhood fascination for elephants, which is an integral part of life in Kerala where I grew up.” She believes that by exploring these animals of splendour in a nostalgic way, she can amplify the astonishment of the spectator. She also uses these artworks to create awareness about the important role the animal plays in our ecosystem and that we need to play our role as humans by protecting them.