its a day or two late in writing about this event but as they say better late than never....it was friday again and i was clear in my mind what i was going to do this friday evening...it was India Art Festival ( 19th - 22nd Dec, 11 am to 7.30 pm) at Nehru Center, Discovery of India building, Worli, Mumbai....with more than 500 artists presenting their work, it was going to be a visual treat...
hoping on to the train at Churchgate, I got down at Mahalaxmi and got into a taxi to head towards the majestic Nehru Center.
Nehru center - Discovery of India Building
The design of the building has its own charm - its kind of a mesh which spirals up towards the sky...The campus is also home to Nehru planetarium...but today my eyes were fixed on galaxy of artists...
As i entered the building i was greeted by hundreds of paintings displayed along the walls of ground floor and i got the hint of what to expect in next two three hours. The best part was my friend and upcoming abstract artist in mumbai circles - Rahul Inamdar, had his stall put up at the festival too. well that meant I had my VIP passes ready for me ;) ( as you see it helps to have connections at the right places :D )
as my buddy guided me through maze of stalls, i got a fleeting glance of art from all the corners of India...from rajasthan to west bengal, from assam to mumbai...
we first headed towards Rahul's stall...and boom!!! didnt he do the arrangement in perfect way...i felt as if the sun just shined in front of me...
Rahul Inamdar's exhibit
The theme of his exhibit is "Space"... that space within us where we are cozy with ourselves and when in contact with it we dont need any thing from the outerworld...the lighting was perfect and it was the best arrangement of stall in the whole set-up, leaving ample "space" for the visitors to actually get dissolve in the space o f
p a i n t i n g s . . .
after reaching at stall, we had impromptu evening snacks - coffee n some nice cheese sandwiches...with my hunger pangs satiated...i started out to douse my artistic hunger by going around the stalls...
what i saw left me amazed...some of the artists had created some wonderful piece of art...putting their heart n soul on canvas...most the paintings were figurative but what caught my eye were abstract paintings...i specially have liking towards abstract paintings...abstract painting has a life of its own and takes on it own character...to put it in perspective, at a recently conducted painting's auction conducted by world famous Christie's auction house, an abstract painting by world renowned artist Vasudev S Gaitonde sold for a whopping 20.5 crores...phewww...leaves u breathless ain't it...
well as i meandered through the exhibition i lost my track of time only to realise that it was end of day's play...the clock has struck 7.30 pm and it was time to wind-up...but in my heart it was still "Yeh Dil Maange More!!!" just when Rahul said - 'how about another exhibition?' well those words were music to my ears...i was like "neki aur puch puch" and lo we headed towards another exhibition of abstractionist Prabhakar Barwe...
The Prabhakar Barwe Retrospective is held at Percept Art, Raghuvanshi Estate Compound, Lower Parel (W) until 28th Feb 2014...it is exhibition of Barwe's works from 1955-1995...some of the paintings are on loan from private collectors while some of the never-seen-before paintings are from artist family's collection...
some of the works are simply fabulous...and such is gravity of some of the paintings that one can end up spending hours standing in front of a single painting...and then that made me realise the might of Barwe...to put in perspective i watched paintings of atleast 50 artists at art festival in two hours whereas here two hours were not enough even for half of Barwe's paintings...truly an enriching experience...it was 9.15 and as the realities of outer world brought us back to our senses, we left the Barwe's world with an eerie sense of incompleteness only to yearn for one more visit....
