The quite vast display of works by Kanaka Murthy, accompanied by a substantial documentary film, was held at the Venkatappa Art Gallery (May 20 to 25) to mark the fact that this senior sculptor from Bangalore became this year's recipient of the Nadoja R M Hadapad Award which had been instituted by the Old Students Association of the Ken School of Art.
!['Nireekshe' by Kanaka Murthy]( "'Nireekshe' by Kanaka Murthy")
The moving spirits behind the award include some distinguished and cutting-edge contemporary artists; hence the traditional character of this exhibition may have surprised someone not familiar with the history of local art education. To remember R M Hadapad here, then, lets one understand the gesture of warm regard.
At a time when the City lacked proper institutions of learning in art, his modest Ken School for decades offered a rudimentary basis, inclusiveness and encouragement. However, one may estimate Hadapad's own aesthetics which bridged conventional, academic skills and diverse experiments with modernism that passionate encouragement combined with prolific, personal perseverance where the boundaries between private and professional areas blurred, eventually established a solid foundation. Naturally perhaps, his erstwhile students now wish to honour others who, similarly to Hadapad, have been contributing to that foundation during a constant, non-glamorous effort.
Kanaka Murthy's region in the art world, on the one hand, refers to a period earlier yet than Hadapad's, one which fully embraced the two once alien strands - colonially acquired realism and rediscovered classical Indian sculpture styles, both needed to coexist when indigenous future was considered.
On the other hand, her continuing to use the same sources on par reflects the more recent governmental policy promoting traditional canons of Karnataka besides the normal requirement of official statuaries. The sculptor who does mostly commissions and possibly is not too keen on self-expression or complex concepts, indeed, embodies the nowadays somewhat forgotten values of the artisanship ethos and its slow and inconspicuous building of a broad environment underscored by her practice of teaching and working on projects jointly with younger artists.
Thus, the dual paths of her oeuvre found a balanced and to an extent complementary contrast as several academic head portraits surrounded by mostly southern, even local divine icons of various periods. The realistic heads and busts which presented a gamut of important personalities from history, politics, culture and religion did follow a rather predictable way with assuring literal description and so instant recognition.
Done in different sizes, they oscillated between the matter-of-fact or somewhat wooden and the more intimate or immediate, especially when aided by deep, evocative facial furrows, the latter qualities becoming evident in the female images. That was enabled probably by the employment of soft, pliable fibre-glass, although it was made to resemble bronze along with its frequent metallic hardness. One of such touching portraits was of Vadiraj, Kanaka Murthy's own guide through the south Indian canons. Rendered mostly in bronze-imitating fibre-glass and in stone, the array of traditional gods and lesser but charming characters also showed a range of both stylistic options and manner of execution.
Predominantly, the images wished to retain maximal faithfulness to the copied originals, this result sometimes achieved bit sometimes diluting over hesitant, familiar ways with modernisation, like smoothing and simplifying of otherwise intricate detail, somewhat expressionistic roughing up of the surface or introducing Madonna looks to a Hindu goddess. A very moving piece belonged to the archaic "Nireekshe" figure whose terracotta body could capture the simultaneous roughness and delicacy of its almost erased features.
Conventional youth
If one expected that the interestingly titled exhibition "Eye and the Object" promised a degree of probing, it did not deliver any of that. In fact, what the five young and very young artists from Bengal brought together may not have been loud or technically insufficient, nevertheless, proved to adhere to a few easy and conventional options.
Unassuming and simple among them, but also uninventive, was Pradip Chakraborty with his gracefully realistic, sparing paintings of water birds. D G N Sumana tried for an intriguing combination of near-photographic faces and stylised folksy doll-like motifs falling, however, into design. Whereas decorative patterning governed the abstracted cityscapes of Sasanka Ghosh in a straight way, under Barnali Bhattacharyya's brush it relaxed suggestive of organic processes yet only to artificially mix with cutely mannered human heads.
Although consummate technique-wise, the small bronzes with pleasant-rough rustic types by Prabhat Majhi were really stereotypical and commercially oriented, even their visible inspiration from Dokra art not relieving them of the knick-knack impact.
The moving spirits behind the award include some distinguished and cutting-edge contemporary artists; hence the traditional character of this exhibition may have surprised someone not familiar with the history of local art education. To remember R M Hadapad here, then, lets one understand the gesture of warm regard. At a time when the City lacked proper institutions of learning in art, his modest Ken School for decades offered a rudimentary basis, inclusiveness and encouragement. However, one may estimate Hadapad's own aesthetics which bridged conventional, academic skills and diverse experiments with modernism that passionate encouragement combined with prolific, personal perseverance where the boundaries between private and professional areas blurred, eventually established a solid foundation. Naturally perhaps, his erstwhile students now wish to honour others who, similarly to Hadapad, have been contributing to that foundation during a constant, non-glamorous effort.
Kanaka Murthy's region in the art world, on the one hand, refers to a period earlier yet than Hadapad's, one which fully embraced the two once alien strands - colonially acquired realism and rediscovered classical Indian sculpture styles, both needed to coexist when indigenous future was considered.
On the other hand, her continuing to use the same sources on par reflects the more recent governmental policy promoting traditional canons of Karnataka besides the normal requirement of official statuaries. The sculptor who does mostly commissions and possibly is not too keen on self-expression or complex concepts, indeed, embodies the nowadays somewhat forgotten values of the artisanship ethos and its slow and inconspicuous building of a broad environment underscored by her practice of teaching and working on projects jointly with younger artists.
Thus, the dual paths of her oeuvre found a balanced and to an extent complementary contrast as several academic head portraits surrounded by mostly southern, even local divine icons of various periods. The realistic heads and busts which presented a gamut of important personalities from history, politics, culture and religion did follow a rather predictable way with assuring literal description and so instant recognition.
Done in different sizes, they oscillated between the matter-of-fact or somewhat wooden and the more intimate or immediate, especially when aided by deep, evocative facial furrows, the latter qualities becoming evident in the female images. That was enabled probably by the employment of soft, pliable fibre-glass, although it was made to resemble bronze along with its frequent metallic hardness. One of such touching portraits was of Vadiraj, Kanaka Murthy's own guide through the south Indian canons. Rendered mostly in bronze-imitating fibre-glass and in stone, the array of traditional gods and lesser but charming characters also showed a range of both stylistic options and manner of execution.
Predominantly, the images wished to retain maximal faithfulness to the copied originals, this result sometimes achieved bit sometimes diluting over hesitant, familiar ways with modernisation, like smoothing and simplifying of otherwise intricate detail, somewhat expressionistic roughing up of the surface or introducing Madonna looks to a Hindu goddess. A very moving piece belonged to the archaic "Nireekshe" figure whose terracotta body could capture the simultaneous roughness and delicacy of its almost erased features.
Conventional youth
If one expected that the interestingly titled exhibition "Eye and the Object" promised a degree of probing, it did not deliver any of that. In fact, what the five young and very young artists from Bengal brought together may not have been loud or technically insufficient, nevertheless, proved to adhere to a few easy and conventional options.
Unassuming and simple among them, but also uninventive, was Pradip Chakraborty with his gracefully realistic, sparing paintings of water birds. D G N Sumana tried for an intriguing combination of near-photographic faces and stylised folksy doll-like motifs falling, however, into design. Whereas decorative patterning governed the abstracted cityscapes of Sasanka Ghosh in a straight way, under Barnali Bhattacharyya's brush it relaxed suggestive of organic processes yet only to artificially mix with cutely mannered human heads.
Although consummate technique-wise, the small bronzes with pleasant-rough rustic types by Prabhat Majhi were really stereotypical and commercially oriented, even their visible inspiration from Dokra art not relieving them of the knick-knack impact.