Oldest materials and beauty of the environment

Time of India

29-05-2025

Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE
At the Bespoke Art Gallery at Ahmedabad, it is the English Methodist hymn that hums in our senses as we glimpse the world's oldest materials, pen and paper and clay that extol the beauty of the earth as trees, as ceramics and a steel wired sculpture to harness World Environment Day that falls on June 5th ,2025.
Tribal artist Bhajji Shyam
India's tribal artist Bhajju Shyam creates a tall Vriksha that melds miniature tradition as well as textural nuances in his work that at once serenades the tireless striving of familial groups that tirelessly venerate the ecological world.Through the lens of his life in Madhya Pradesh Bhajju's painting and drawing as a testimony to trees all over the universe as sentinels of time.
Leena Batra celadon
Senior ceramic artist Leena Batra's celadon pot is a humane ledger of the genesis of ceramic studies in form and fervour.
Leena takes us back to the term 'celadon ware', also known as green ware, which refers to a type of ceramic with a soft grey-green-coloured glaze. The effect is achieved through applying an iron-rich liquefied clay 'slip' to the ceramic before it is fired in a kiln. During the heating process, the iron oxidises to leave a delicate and lustrous green coating.Despite its later European name, the celadon glaze technique originated in China during the Shang (1600-1046 BC) and Zhou (1046-256 BC) dynasties, when potters began experimenting with glaze recipes.
Saraswati's towers of tea ceremony
Anagama fired stoneware stand like sentinels in silence as Saraswati's towers of tea ceremony bring in different elements that extol virtues of everyday living. Density, depth and texture all become her leitmotif in a series that tell stories of time and tide in glazes and gravitas. Saraswati who lives in Auroville says that her towers tell stories of life and humans and households. Within the details and dynamics we move from the mechanics of the craft of clay and firing to portray compelling characters in form, develop effective narrative structures, and edit ourselves into focus to the more profound questions of artistic resources and reflections that will remain as cherished memories and experiences.
Keshari Nandan's Picasso platters
Of verve and vivacity in stoneware are Keshari Nandan's stoneware platters sculpted as a tribute to Pablo Picasso who created his ceramic ware and painted owls and bulls over them. Keshari creates a sculptural identity by creating an owl and a bull on a pair of platters. Keshari and award winning ceramic artist reminds us that Picasso used his playful approach to the medium, and embraced the motif of the owl, its presence recurring prominently through many of his ceramic works. The allure of the subject was stimulated in Vallauris, alongside his growing appreciation of ceramics, as the owl was an ancient symbol of the neighbouring town, Antibes.
The connection with the figure of the owl was deepened when the artist discovered an owl with an injured claw during his time in Antibes. Picasso's partner Françoise Gilot documented this experience in her autobiography, Life With Picasso, stating 'one of his claws had been injured. We bandaged it and it gradually healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris, we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons and the turtledoves.' A great lover of animals, Picasso gained a great affection for the bird, incorporating the muse into the many whimsical ceramics he went on to create.
Vineet Kacker's quartet of Buddhist iconography
Vineet Kacker's quartet of iconographic symbolism in his single square study as well as three chorten like Buddhist compositions all have an aura of quietude and meditative stillness. Three works belong to his In You I Am series in high fired stoneware while we are drawn toward the beauty of glazes and textures.His square plate Transmigrations reminds us of archaeological excavations that bring back the past and regale our senses as we visit the pages of antiquity.His glazes in the other three works have their own aura of enchantment and the transience of life.
His quartet of works draw from the landscaped iconography of the Himalayas, while his built forms reference the sacred, and personal engagement with sombre spiritual disciplines. His sampling of sequences from familiar imagery to living traditions create a corollary of conversations of multiple ceramic techniques within a single piece, recreating both landscapes and iconographies. His rough textures and the use of layered dry glazes create surfaces that reference the ancient and time-worn. The contrasting shiny embellishments allude to that which is luminous and timeless.
Dhananjay Singh's Tree
The centrepiece at Bespoke Art Gallery's Purusha Prakriti show is Dhananjay Singh's Tree created out of steel wires. This work becomes the contemplative ethos of the show that heralds the environment as an emblematic symbol of civilisational cultures. As a lifelong admirer of flowers and plants, Dhananjay is particularly fond of trees and has never stopped depicting them from his youth to his later years. The present work belonging to the Devin Gawarvala collection was part of Saffronart's exhibition Alchemies of Form, a show of sculptural masterpieces at Bikaner House this year for the India Art Fair.
The sculptor uses simple yet expressive leaves in steel as well as wired steel to portray the trunk reminding us of minerals as well as the botanical beauty of trees as exemplary spirits in the infinite pages of nature's bounty. In the saturated material suggestions and the power of trees that fill the earth this sculpture brings alive the Swiss author Herman Hesse who said: ' Trees are sanctuaries.'
For founder and collector Devin Gawarvala of Bespoke Art Gallery, commerce, culture and collecting all come together to create a synergy that points at the need for being guardians of cultural preservation in the odyssey of preserving contemporary art practices and all that is therein.
Images : Bespoke Art Gallery Ahmedabad
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Views expressed above are the author's own.