Sikkim-born, NCR-based Anki Khurana is a new talent on the horizon, and a recent show presented by E Alkazi of Art Heritage showcased not just her paintings but also a book by Geeti Sen on the painter and her works.
Khurana has been painting for only a few years, and seriously only in the last few years, so while a book might seem a little to early — a reason why Alkazi’s foreword, Khurana’s artist’s statement and Sen’s text read, at times, as echoes of each other — as a catalogue it functions as a record of her growth as an artist.
What is fascinating is the quick grasp that Khurana shows over her tools since the amateurish “Kreepy Krawly Katterpillar” or “Banyan Tree” from 2000 to more recent works that are grand not merely in scale but also in their abstraction.
Clearly, Khurana is fascinated by the minutiae of nature — of algae growing on rocks, of moss and lichens, bark and leaves, driftwood and weathered planks — which she photographs as a record. Her eye takes in these impressions, and it is these that recur across her canvases, in acrylic: a sense of texturing, or forms and colours merging, or worlds that are secret with pregnant lives. For those interested in how artists work, here’s a peek.
THE ALCHEMY OF TRANSFORMATION
The Paintings of Anki Khurana
Author: Geeti Sen
Pages: 113
Price: Rs 3,000
When a painter tells you that his painting must be “seen with the ear”, he is either eccentric (which S H Raza is not) or profound (which he is): adding to the wealth of recently available material on Raza, Art Alive Gallery (which already has a book on him) has collaborated with French publishing house Albin Michel to publish, in English, an earlier work in French on the artist, called Mandalas.
Written by Olivier Germian-Thomas, and translated by M Vardarajan and Padma Natarajan, Mandalas is delightful viewing with its emphasis on Raza’s paintings, many of which are accompanied by texts from the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Puranas, Gita Govind and from Tantra lore, and quotations from Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi and others, to impart a resonance that “heightens perception”.
The author explains the mandala as intrinsic to India, a medium for meditation and one of the mediums of spiritual progress, drawn across homes as “a representation of the cosmos”, but whatever the iconography might mean, in this book of lush paintings, it is Raza’s canvases that look good enough to meditate over.
S H RAZA: MANDALAS
Art Alive Gallery
Author: Olivier Germain-Thomas
Pages: 128
Price: Rs 2,500
