Horses belong to the haunts of history. Throughout the ages, horses have had the power to delight the human imagination. In this collection of Indian contemporary horse studies, we see that horses exist in the minds of artists not just as an idea, but as a documentation of a rhetoric of dreamlike drawings/paintings, like in the hands of India's finest figurative master Jogen Chowdhury or as conceptual artwork on the canvas of modern master Manu Parekh, who extols the horse from the ageless Guernica.
Krishen Khanna's work from his ‘bandwallah’ series personifies the horse that pulls the carriage at wedding processions, providing a commentary on the cultural fabric of Punjabi weddings and bands he would watch during the marriage season in the capital city of Delhi.
For Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, the horse Chetak swims in the abyss of a surrealist dream project with a scooter and a swarm of butterflies denoting life's essence and mortality. When you look at the works of Ranbir Kaleka, you know that the horse is a symbol of a remembrance with more clarity and emotion than most existing works of art. Kaleka paints the epoch of literary allusions as he creates a choreography of characters and places. Nataraj Sharma captures the patient horse waiting in anticipation against colonial architectural nuances, while Jagannath Panda uses fabric to capture the quintessence of the unique quality and beauty of the majestic animal.
In art history, horse figures have been founded upon antiquity, alchemy, as well as various mythologies and everyday items that took highly symbolic form in portraiture, still life, and other genres. Subba Ghosh dips his brush into the depths of solitude to create specific contexts of life in its many rhythms.
The sky with its cumulus clouds and mountain ranges join to form Sudhanshu Sutar's horse, but it is distinguished in all circumstances through a conception of the natural order of the world as he sees it. That is, as a devolution of the domain of light. K G Subramanyan's double-headed horse is listening to his master as his being evolves from his adept and keen awareness of the symbolic power of the narrative that cuts across time. Thota Vaikuntam's little rocking horse appears as a toy in the maternal image of mother and son in conversation while Ompal Sansanwal infuses the horses with the Purusha-Prakriti principle of man and nature as he recreates the silhouette with the textural nuances of the verdant branches of lush trees, overflowing with leaves.
Neither grandiose nor extravagant, Adimoolam's charcoals are horse portraits that tweak the tried-and-true conventions of this popular genre to reveal the quiet grace and gravitas of sifted chapters that speak of a tranquil quietude. Young Yashika Sugandh revels in a miniature mode of composing works of equine stories, from the wide sweeps on large surfaces to concentrated performances on smaller ones. To feel the bristles of pensive and playful moments glide across a body and effectively translate this requires the mining of corporeal memory. A poetics of mark-making is thus established and remains integral to Yashika's practice. Observe the delicacy of each brushstroke as she lovingly paints these subjects that scale gesture in the power of happiness and desire in the life of an equine.
SCULPTURAL VIGNETTES
This suite of sculptures takes on the aesthetics and sentiments of spirited beings. Jogen Chowdhury's bronze goes back to the renaissance and his days in Paris when he studied the European masters. Already fixed in his mind's eye is the image of the horse's body, like a resurrection in the sky of so many stories.
In her own liberalisation of folk idioms, Madhvi Parekh's horse focusses on the 'bare bones' of rustic rhythms. Veer Munshi's white horse references facets of migration as he stands in the aesthetic of silence, with the many miniature migrants walking on its back. While Munshi captures the drama with cold precision, he also seeks the coordinates of spiritual wonder within these zones of human struggles and sorrow.
Valay Shende pursues a primordial silence, one that vibrates with sublimity. His version of the horse created with stainless steel discs prescribes a transformation, as though the experience of being inside could provide a slight elevation from the world beyond its walls.
Gaurab Das travels within the shades, pursuing a poetics of line and single colour patina. His winged horses float with ease in relation to one another.
In all these sculptures, discernible lines persist, the assertion of presence. These discernible subjects are conceived in suggestion and then articulated. These artists are interested in edges and the maintenance of visibility without exact illustration. Scale stages its own connotation as well. These sculptures offer an extended space to dwell within the minds of horse lovers across the four winds and seven seas.
-UMA NAIR