Gallery Dotwalk Presents Amjum Rizve’s Artworks
Bikaner House, New Delhi has opened its gallery space for Amjum Rizve’s upcoming solo show, ‘rra,’ denoted by a pictorial symbol. Presented by Gallery Dotwalk and curated by independent curator and writer Adwait; the show is a great start to 2025. The preview is scheduled for 04th January 2025. The show will continue till 8th January 2025. You can conversate with Rizve on 07th January 2025. A special exhibition walkthrough and collector’s evening will be conducted at Galler Dotwalk on 24th January 2025.
Amjum Rizve’s solo exhibition explores poetics in his recent artworks. It is a collateral exhibition to India Art Fair, 2025. Gallery Dotwalk’s exhibition will feature diverse artworks and mediums including paintings, sculptures, mixed-media artworks, drawings, etc.
Beads on canvas, (25×21 in)
Courtesy – Gallery Dotwalk and Amjum Rizve
What is Amjum Rizve’s Solo Show All About?
The phonetic and pictorial title that denotes the ‘rra’ sound in Malayalam holds a special significance for the artist Amjum Rizve. Its cavernous form echoes a place of rest, a burial mound, a sickle moon floating on a pond. It marks the juncture where the twist of wrist rehearsed during the calligraphy classes at the madrasa met the unruly lines of the Fauves encountered during his BFA at the College of Fine Arts in Thiruvananthapuram. It also signals the contrast between his poetics of the mundane and their baroque stagings.
Acrylic, beads, and textile colour on canvas, (12×10 in)
Courtesy – Gallery Dotwalk and Amjum Rizve
In his first solo in New Delhi, presented by Gallery Dotwalk, Rizve presents a body of work that conveys a range of media from paintings to embroidery and sculpture. Aside from ‘khatati’ (calligraphy) and ‘kadha prasangam’ (storytelling) acquired during childhood, the artist unabashedly folds into his practice embroidery and other crafting techniques he grew up around. The embellishments reveal the mundane interiors of places of devotion—especially those with a secular orientation—in scintillating detail, elevating the ordinary into epiphanic.
Beads and hand-embroidery on Canvas, (48×36 in)
Courtesy – Gallery Dotwalk and Amjum Rizve
Far from being merely ornamental, the baroque mobilised by Amjum Rizve is a layering technique that primes his immediate surroundings for magic-realist extrapolations. In this manner, the strange ‘theyyams’ (rituals) and encounters that Rizve situates amidst familiar sites of sacred groves, kabristan, precincts of dargahs, and watery paddy fields serve to highlight particular aspects of socio-political reality, urging reflection. The frequently invoked subaltern deities like ‘Pottan Theyyam’ and ‘Muthappan Theyyam’ and rebel figures such as ‘Iblis’ or the grenade-lobbing monkey become playful devices for engaging with different and difficult feelings. In addition to his communing with difference, he also seeks to hold stillness with the view to gain a nuanced perspective on reality.
Beads and textile color on canvas, (25×21 in)
Courtesy – Gallery Dotwalk and Amjum Rizve
The works in rra thus oscillate between fantastical happenings and banal passages, each brimming with mystical and poetic possibilities.
About Adwait
Adwait (b. 1992) is a nomadic independent curator and theorist engaging queer-feminist tropes and formats to probe the intersections of ecology, mysticism, subjectivity formation, contemporary technogenesis, and biopolitics. Theirs is an integrative practice that seeks to promote collectivity, care, and cohesiveness within the arts ecology. Recent curations include the fifth edition of the Mardin Biennial (Mardin, 2022), the fifteenth edition of the Queer Arts Festival (Vancouver, 2022), ‘Mutarerium‘ (Mumbai, 2019), and ‘Caressing History‘ (New Delhi, 2018).
About Amjum Rizve
Born in Kerala in 1991, Amjum Rizve has done graduation from Trivandrum Fine Arts College and post-graduation from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore. Amjum’s work has solemnly come from his own eternal life experiences. The highly fascinating influence of Persian art, combined with enthralling decorative artistic influence, set his work to a higher level of perfection. Mythology, religion, poetry, literature, art history, textile, and decorative art from both Eastern and Western traditions– all these are infused with artistic imagination.
Amjum Rizve is trying to elaborate on his socio-political activity and arguments through the images. His recent works suggest a fantastical world, full of intricate details, rich colour and a registered collection of intensive drawings and religious images. H has exhibited at Kochi, Alappuzha, New Delhi, and Hyderabad.
The artist currently lives and works in Mysore, Karnataka.
About Gallery Dotwalk
Headquartered at Delhi NCR, Gallery Dotwalk is an art gallery promoted by Sreejith CN, the founder-director, and has an active presence in the Indian art scene. Dotwalk builds an art space, that pivots on integrity & genuineness, that becomes the hub of future masters, that converses with art enthusiasts around the world utilising the prowess of technology and that makes positive contributions to the art milieu.
Image Courtesy – Gallery Dotwalk
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