A couple of Delhi’s oldest trees add to the looks of two contemporary artworks by their broad trunks and canopy, as if clasping modernity with grandfatherly benignity. The carved and cast forms are among eleven such aesthetic expressions that comprise an exhibition currently on in a central part of the national capital.
One of the basic ideas of the 16-day event at a lawn along the Lutyens’ is to bring sculptures and installations out into the open—from the closed environs of galleries they mostly get a view. “I wanted them to breathe…freely,” says Uma Nair, who has curated the show at India International Centre (IIC) that has been a meeting place of high-brow cultural and intellectual offerings for five-and-a-half decades now.
The December 6-21 ‘iSculpt’ features artists of different generations from across the country, where three-dimensional shapes seldom find venues on par with fellow genres such as paintings, photographs, graphic art or illustrations. Impressed with the assortment done in various media, lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung, who inaugurated the winter-time spectacle at IIC’s Gandhi King Plaza, has asked author-scholar Nair to explore the scope for similar ventures in Delhi.
Occupying the pool garden’s central space is a bronze work by Neeraj Gupta, who heads the Delhi Art Society founded by late critic-columnist Keshav Malik. Aligning intricate figures with an overall choreographic character, Gupta’s ‘Divine Love’ is a “testimony to the warmth of human relationships”, according to the curator. “It’s an eternal quest for a civilisation to live and procreate,” adds Nair, who has curated 15-odd art shows.
Middle-aged Atul Sinha’s 2015 work is of wood, betraying an element of spirituality, given the immense concentration that the furrows warrant. Blending different cultures and religious ethos, ‘Praise the Lord’ is carved from a single log of oil-smeared sheesham wood with dark-brown exterior.
Innocence I and III are two works by Kolkatan Tapas Biswas, intricately weaving together tree-leaves and twigs in aluminium—though to contrasting effects. The vertically conceived first item has a celebratory mood, while the second one is more ponderous with a boy-like figure, head down, seated in the middle. They reached the show from Vikram Bachawat of the eastern metro’s Aakriti Gallery, reveals Kerala-born Nair, who has been a Delhiite for more than half a century.
Vineet Kacker’s ‘Revolution Marker’ is in a rare medium: ceramics. A student of the School of Planning and Architecture, he has lived in Buddhist monasteries, eventually blending the beauty of design and art.
As the youngest in the lot, Madhab Das seeks to portray how real estate has endangered the ecology of pockets that are in the grip of rapid urbanisation. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ prominently shows an iron-cast deer—its belly split, and stuffed with bricks and iron rods. “It is a statement on the loss of habitat for the beautiful animal,” notes the curator. Focusing on a bull, Arun Pandit's ‘Mask Seller’, too, speaks of the monumentality of nature’s force.
Documentary-maker Simran Lamba’s ‘Radha Krishna Shunya’ assembles a few medium-shaped Chinese vats: the dark among them representing the Yadava prince and the fair ones his famed lover. Water-colourist Sanjay Bhattacharya’s vertical bronze statue is an abstract take on the same Hindu god, with just the feet, hands, flute and peacock-feather lending a touch of realism.
Rajasthan’s Mukesh Sharma, who participated in a Venice Biennale, has come up with an installation made primarily of thrown-away computer keyboards and Styrofoam packing material. “It hints at the degree of conspicuous consumption,” the curator says.
By twilight, as most of the works acquire a glow—thanks to tasteful lighting by Amit Gupta of Vis à vis—Nair recalls a decade-old episode where physicist-policymaker M.G.K. Menon told an IIC gathering, “Art needs space, not walls.” At iSculpt today, “no work is exactly pretty, but then the intention is to stir the human mind”, she adds.
