For some leading artists at the core of India’s progressive artistic and intellectual discourses during this period, figuration was a link to social, political, and community concerns, while abstraction was perceived as more personal and individual. At the same time, abstraction was also linked to international trends in modern art.
The exhibition continues the thematic exploration of art from post-Independence and post-Partition India started with The Body Unbound. It builds on and expands the framework suggested by the first part of the series: to explore the relationship between figuration and abstraction in Indian modernist art. The exhibition defines and discerns the characteristics that distinguish abstraction in modernist Indian art from abstraction in Euro-American modernism, and shows the individual, independent trajectory of abstraction in India after Independence.
In addition to extraordinary paintings, this exhibition presents experimental films created by leading painters M. F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, and Akbar Padamsee in the late 1960s, showing them for the first time in a museum context and in relation to the artists’ paintings.
Beth Citron was previously the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Rubin Museum of Art. Her exhibitions for the Rubin Museum included Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything (2016), Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India (2014), Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia (2014), and the three-part exhibition series Modernist Art from India (2011-13). She completed a PhD in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught in the Art History Department at New York University, from which she also earned a BA in Fine Arts.
This exhibition was supported, in part, by the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.
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