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ALTERNATIVE TRUTH

ALTERNATIVE TRUTH

by Ravish Kumar

Postcards from the Pandemic

Postcards from the Pandemic

Art India | Volume 26, Issue 2 | December 2022

Even though you enter Mumbai-based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke’s expansive new space with prior knowledge of the subject of Abir Karmakar’s show Everyday – mimetic chronicles of the doom and gloom wrought by the coronavirus pandemic – you are unprepared for the surge of emotions experienced on encountering the works physically. 

Everyday | Abir Karmakar

Everyday | Abir Karmakar

ARTFORUM, September 2022

Abir Karmakar's oil paintings use photorealism as a kind of abstraction. Drawing on photographs of now familiar pandemic scenes, the artist slows the viewer's recognition of the subject matter, so that municipal officials, hazmat suits, and yellow bags of medical waste appear first and foremost as luminous scrapes, licks, and dissolutions of paint. 

 

‘Woman is as Woman Does’: An ode to womanpower | Frontline

‘Woman is as Woman Does’: An ode to womanpower | Frontline

By Anupama Katakam

Mumbai’s iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) is celebrating its centenary this year. To celebrate the event along with the 75th year of Independence, an exhibition titled  Woman is as Woman Does, featuring 27 Indian women artists, opened at the museum on August 13 (August 13-October 16). Curated by art critic Nancy Adajania and showing at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation and Premchand Roychand Gallery of the museum, the exhibition is an immersive experience where the images reveal as much about India’s feminist movement as the texts accompanying them.

Ratheesh T. | Spotlight

Ratheesh T. | Spotlight

Brigid Uccia

Attributed to “magical realism”, Ratheesh T’s earlier paintings are surreal—often hypnotising—images of the mythological universe that informs the local culture he hails from. Interspersed with his personal iconography, his large-scale paintings are bold statements on social injustice and the marginalisation of the native inhabitants, who, as daily-wage earners, battle for survival and self-sustenance. ‘Allotted Land’ (2018) represents the intricate social fabric of village life in southern Kerala, ridden by poverty, manual labour, alcoholism as well as the betrayal by a political ideology which pledged social equality for all. Teeming with details, groups of figures and animals form various intersecting focal points, cohesively woven together into a singular picture plane. This “genre painting” of epic dimension suggests a deep sympathy with the “orphans of modernisation”, acutely observed by the artist “as if I was one of them”.

Sosa Joseph | Skye Arundhati Thomas

Sosa Joseph | Skye Arundhati Thomas

May 2022

Sosa Joseph has lived most of her life by the Pampa River in Kerala, India. The fourteen paintings in her exhibition “Where Do We Come From?” did not stray far from its paddy banks. Each was a flash of something Joseph has remembered, half recollections that have come to her in sudden bursts. In A Viper in the Sugar Cane Field, 2021, for instance, we saw a crowd walking down a towpath lined with tall sawtooth cane leaves. The scene is blurred, as though sliding away, caught only for a moment before it disappears; it is tinged with uncer-tainty. A figure in repose, head tilted back, is being carried to the choppy water. Behind them, a snake is wrapped around a slim pole and an almost-full moon blinks in the indigo. 

Sosa Joseph | My Family and Other Animals

Sosa Joseph | My Family and Other Animals

by Zeenat Nagree

January 13 - February 26

In much of Édouard Glissant's life and theoretical work, the archipelago occupied a central place, so much so that he used its geographical form to theorise a state of being and relation, which he termed "archipelagic thinking”. The concept locates Glissant as an island-dweller - he came from Martinique - and indicates how his experiences on the continent of Europe were oriented towards the environment in which he had spent the first 18 years of his life.

Sosa Joseph: Flow of Consciousness

Sosa Joseph: Flow of Consciousness

By Georgina Maddox | Art Dose

Taking it back to the Pamba River and to sights and sounds that she grew up with, Kerala-based artist Sosa Joseph’s latest works are a refreshing take on the ‘purpose’ of life.

 

Sosa Joseph returns to the Pamba River | Ocula Insight

Sosa Joseph returns to the Pamba River | Ocula Insight

By Sherry Paik

January 13 - February 26

Drawn from the riverside village of her childhood and early adulthood in Kerala, India, Sosa Joseph's paintings trace the origins of her life back to the river. Joseph grew up in the north of Parumala, a small town on the Pamba River, and activities and festivities associated with the river—from turtle hunting to luffa gathering—were a constant in her life before the artist left to study painting at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Rendered in the artist's characteristic, loose figurative style, 15 new canvases completed between 2019 and 2021 manifest Joseph's memories of home in Where do we come from? at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai (13 January–26 February 2022). 

Abul Hisham: Intertwining Socio-cultural Spaces with Personal Narratives

Abul Hisham: Intertwining Socio-cultural Spaces with Personal Narratives

Abul Hisham is a young and talented artist based in Thrissur, Kerala, who has done four solo shows and participated in several group shows both in India and abroad. After completing his BFA and masters in fine arts, he was awarded the prestigious Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2013. He was recently selected for the art residency programme at Rijksakademie van Beeldente Kunsten (2021), Amsterdam, the Netherlands; earlier he was awarded residencies at Skowhegan Artist Residency, Maine, USA in 2019, and at “What About Art” (WAA), Mumbai, in collaboration with Inlaks India Foundation and Harmony Art Residency, Mumbai, by Reliance India Foundation, 2015. His body of work explores the notions of desire, death and memory, and how they intertwine with the social and cultural spaces and his own personal narratives. 

Benitha Perciyal, Critical Collective, Amrita Gupta Singh, raw materials, coconut, resin, wood, frankincense, raw banana fibre, minimalism, minimalist abstraction, Arte Povera

Memory, Materiality, Sediment: Benitha Perciyal

Amrita Gupta Singh, Critical Collective

August 26, 2019

An alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai, Perciyal trained in painting (BFA) and printmaking (MFA) and progressed to self-portraiture, conceptual installations, and found assemblages after she received a junior research grant to work at the Lalit Kala Studios in Chennai. Through printmaking, she discovered the qualities of surface, texture, and positive/negative space, which expanded to three dimensional work employing the corporeality of touch. Her transversal practice comes forth in her solo exhibition, Aggregate at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (August 8- October 15, 2019), firmly embedded in figurative and representational forms, and also exploring minimalist abstraction.

 Jackson Pollock, FN Souza, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, P. R. Satheesh FRENETIC, ARTFORUM Critics' Picks, Zeenat Nagree

ARTFORUM, Critics' Picks — P.R. Satheesh "FRENETIC"

Zeenat Nagree, ARTFORUM

November, 2019

Eyes—alert and alarmed—pop out of P. R. Satheesh's paintings. Their gazes evoke the aftermath of a tense encounter, its charge still lingering. With this focus on the ocular, and the interplay of consciousness it suggests, the differences between Satheesh's subjects—be they human, fish, or insect—seem not to matter. They all appear troubled or shocked, much like the men and women who bare their teeth in F. N. Souza's paintings, here jostling for space in dense compositions made between 2014 and 2019.

PR Satheesh, gestural abstraction, Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism, pen and ink drawings, Indian ink on paper

Memories of a Home

Dipti Nagpaul, Indian Express

November 5, 2019

Kerala-based artist P.R. Satheesh focusses on his bond with nature throught 'abstract landscapes'

Ratheesh T., realism, oil on canvas, environmental art, Kerala, Trivandrum, Malayali, communism, rice flour, coconut

The Artist and his Backyard

Anuj Daga, ARTIndia Magazine

December, 2018

Ratheesh T.'s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community.

Life is Long, Indian Art is Cheap

Life is Long, Indian Art is Cheap

Richard C. Morais (Barron Penta Editior)

September 28, 2018

A few years ago, Henry Kaufman, the fabled economist formerly at Salomon Brothers, told me in his crusty German accent that "much in financila markets and life is comparative". 

At Home in a Gallery

At Home in a Gallery

Review, ARTIndia, The Season, March 2018

March 2018

Girish Shahane steps into Abir Karmakar's house of illusions. 

Abir Karmakar's contribution to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 spread across the Kashi Art Gallery, a repurposed old Portuguese house not interesting enough architecturally to quality for the 'heritage' label.  

Indian Satire: Mining the traditions of the political cartoon

Indian Satire: Mining the traditions of the political cartoon

Shanay Jhaveri, frieze magazine

March 18, 2015

Having trained as a painter at Maharaja Sayajirao University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, Rajan became one of the youngest members of the highly politicized but short-lived group, the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Active from 1985 to ’89, the group aggressively rejected the narrative tendency of earlier Indian artists.

Tall Tales | Abul Hisham

Tall Tales | Abul Hisham

Verve Magazine | Text by Sitanshi Talati Parikh

Satirical collages and metaphors make for descriptive storytelling in Abul Hisham's new works showing in Mumbai

Street Theatre

Street Theatre

Sanjukta Sharma, Live Mint

March 22, 2014

Everyday scenes from Kerala through the sophisticated painterly eye of Sosa Joseph

"The Common" Sosa Joseph

"The Common" Sosa Joseph

Kamala Kapoor

October 6 — November 12, 2009

While some of Kerala based Sosa Joseph’s varied art works – pastels, watercolors, oils and pencil – mine the possibilities inherent in realistic evocations, others attempt the same with evocative abstractions. One can wander through her small and large format paintings, their relatively spare images, refreshingly at odds with those loaded with frenzy or ambiguity, in what often passes for profundity in the conceptual claustrophobia of a great deal of current art practice.

Moving Earth

Moving Earth

Time Out Mumbai

Surreal, twisted and often disturbing, Ratheesh T's new works are full of violence, despair and darkness. Blood streams through the intricate streets. Krishnas, Jesuses and mosques stand with beatific expressions while innocents are hunted and killed. A carpenter with a distinct resemblance to Ratheesh himself lies on a crate marked fragile, in the precise pose as that of an old skeleton near him. 

Terror -Struck

Terror -Struck

Verve

There is no disputing the fact ha Ratheesh T's paintings are born out of an unlikely alliance between the picturesque landscapes and bustling townscapes of his native Kerala - for the tension between tradition and modernity is palpable in the concerns he explores. Environmental degradation and social instability are evidentlv major issues that disturb him and his hyper-realistic paintings place them centerstage through the juxtaposition of unrelated backdrops and colourful characters in his dramatic compositions.

International Reviews: Bhupen Khakhar

International Reviews: Bhupen Khakhar

Laurie A. Stein, ARTNews

September 1998

A master storyteller, Bhupen Khakhar is regarded in his native country and internationally as one of the most important Indian artists of the last 30 years. Although noted for a pictorial language that is deliberately hybrid—a mix of Indian folk-art traditions and modern European realism, sex and religion, modesty and flamboyance—Khakhar is most commonly lauded for pioneering a new contect for homosexuality in Indian art. 

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