Artist Profile

Digvijay Nikam “Art extracts every bit of existence from you — that’s the promise of the divine.” – Raqib Shaw  Among the thousands who were displaced during the political unrest of 1989 in Kashmir was the family of the artist Raqib Shaw. Born in Calcutta in 1974, Shaw spent his formative years in Kashmir where […]

Digvijay Nikam  One of India’s most important art collections was put together by the Indian airline company Air India. The ‘Maharaja Collection’ as it came to be called comprises over 4000 works of art including paintings, sculptures, and sketches by stalwarts of the Indian art scene post-independence like M. F. Hussain, V. S. Gaitonde, Anjolie

Digvijay Nikam In the late 19th and early 20th century when the Nationalist movement in India was in full sway with the revivalist school of painting in Bengal responding to its current techniques and content that departed from the British academic style, the Bombay artists were producing work that was highly academic in nature. Mahadev Vishwanath

Smriti Malhotra   In June 2019, Phoenix Palladium hosted an exhibition of life-sized installations by Valay Shende called, “Spirit of Bombay”. The large installations depicted the known and popular symbols of Mumbai, these were re-imagined in a creative manner by the Nagpur-born artist.   The exhibition ‘Spirit of Bombay’ drew upon the unflinching spirit of

Digvijay Nikam I’m interested in the type of abstraction where you look out at the world, see the horror—sometimes it is horror—and you drag that horror kicking and screaming into your studio and you wrestle with it and you find something beautiful in it.  Mark Bradford Mark Bradford is an American visual artist highly acclaimed

Digvijay Nikam What kind of relationship might the distinct mediums of sculpture and photography share? What are the limits of artistic expression? The work of the celebrated and equally censored American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is the right place to unpack these concerns. Born in 1946 in New York and brought up in a strict Catholic

Digvijay Nikam ‘Prolific’ is the word that describes the artistic career of the Indo-Canadian artist Panchal Mansaram, who worked every single day over his decades-long career leading to a huge body of work. Born in India in 1934, Mansaram grew up in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, completed his graduation from the Sir J.J. School of Arts

Digvijay Nikam  What kind of relationship does the work of art bear with the artist’s body? Is the latter only an agent to aesthetic creation where the locus of any transformation is the art work and not the body? The contemporary Indian artist Nikhil Chopra has tried to bridge this chasm by foregrounding the body