Bringing BV Doshi’s Art to the Public

Vadehra Art Gallery is currently presenting a solo exhibition of drawings by Balkrishna Doshi, India’s only architect to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest possible accolade, and an eminent artist in his own right. The exhibition ‘Blueprints of Illusion: Drawings by Balkrishna Doshi,’ opened on 15 October 2024, will continue until 12 November 2024. It features 25 black-and-white drawings dated between 2014 and 2022. 

Balkrishna Doshi has conceptualised, created and constructed over 100 buildings and spaces of varying scale and significance across the country over his seven-decade-long career, committing to sustainability and supporting the relationship between place and culture. Early in his career, Doshi served an apprenticeship under Le Corbusier, who was known to frequently retire to his sketchbook as he remained devoted to contemplating a productive integration of sculpture, painting and architecture in his work.

Corbusier’s profound European influence conversed with Doshi’s treasury of Indian sensibility, bringing to Doshi’s art, just as in his architecture, a cerebral universalism that prioritizes experience and expression. BV Doshi has consequently created a hybrid visual language that recognizes the materiality of the place, often through textures of memory, while its spirit is reclusive, ambling inwards to an immaterial, immeasurable world accessed only through personal cognitions and self-consciousness. 

Balkrishna Doshi’s drawings share a motive for wholesome self-expression, beginning with recognizable inspirations from Indian miniatures that evolve into abstractions of the formalism he learned under Le Corbusier. Doshi’s free-flowing compositions are steeped in a powerful push of memories from childhood as much as philosophical questions. The surrealist nature of his works is ignited by a rich subconscious, with space, form, rhythm, material and location contributing to making memory a tool in and of itself with which to pursue the magic of personal re-discovery.

In Balkrishna Doshi’s works, attention to the line is practically animist in nature, through curvatures that imply recognition of collective flow – the various movements of the hand, the body,  the psyche, the intellect, as well as the movement of the line and finally the image itself. These works tend to invoke a gamut of moods, seasons and spatial movements through volumes, texture, proportion, and suggestive historical and mythical situations. While expressing spontaneity and defying structure, their dream-like compositions edge towards biographical and paradoxical explorations, encrusted with remnants of memories, looking inward and outward in the same moment, as an artistic memoir of his life. 

At the preview, held on 15 October, artist Dayanita Singh and architect Khushnu Panthaki Hoof launched a monograph of Balkrishna Doshi’s fine art practice titled ‘The Art of  Balkrishna Doshi,’ published by Vadehra Art Gallery in collaboration with German publishing house Koenig Books in 2023, and previously launched during Frieze week at the prestigious  Serpentine Gallery in London last year. 

About Balkrishna Doshi

Born in 1927 in Pune, Balkrishna Doshi studied architecture at the Sir J.J. School of  Architecture in Mumbai. He is the first Indian architect to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker  Prize (2018) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal for Architecture (2022). He has also won Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, to name a few in his extensive list.

His drawings and paintings have been exhibited at various museums worldwide and are part of international collections such as New Delhi, Shanghai, Weil Am Rhein, Munich, Vienna, Genk, Baroda, London, New York, and Basel. BV Doshi passed away in 2023 in Ahmedabad.

About Vadehra Art Gallery

Representing a roster of artists across four generations, Vadehra Art Gallery was established in 1987.  The gallery’s programming takes the form of carefully curated and frequent exhibitions at two prominent locations in Delhi,  alongside art events, engaging conversations and a growing digital platform. The gallery continues to present curated projects at prestigious art fairs and institutional venues globally. They ventured into publishing in 1996, producing literature on ongoing exhibitions and artist projects.

Image – Untitled, Pastel on paper, 14.25 x 20 in, (2017); Courtesy – Vadehra Art Gallery

Take A Heritage Walk Through These 7 Museums and Art Galleries in Ahmedabad