Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics

These artists form the bulwark of the market and include well-known names with a consistent body and quality of work. To the public, they represent the face of Indian art without having to carry the burden of social engagement, thereby, believing in art for its own sake.
Curated By: Kishore Singh
Published: Jul 2, 2016
Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
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  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
  • Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics
Hold me a mirror
MADHURI BHADURI (b. 1958)
Reflections
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 inches

This Pune-based artist of impressionistic landscapes is imbued with a heightened understanding of colour. Almost painstakingly, she returns to her favourite scenes, tweaking their hues as she teases a response from reflections—a favoured trope—in which she finds her oeuvre, whether in waterbodies or rain-swept streets. There was a time when Madhuri Bhaduri’s landscape oeuvre ran to the abstract, but more recently she seems to be irretrievably drawn to some suggestion of form, whether a hut on the horizon or a flotilla of lilies in a pond.

Attracted towards depictions of light in nature, of pearly dawns and flushed sunsets, Bhaduri seems to enjoy the glimpses in her reflections, as reality breaks up in rippled impressions, causing us to look closely at the object of her attention. She paints from memory, increasingly finding a pensive quietness that she seeks out in the confines of her studio. Though she works across mediums, it is oil and canvas that appeal most to her —perhaps because each layer and reflection has the magic possibility of stories untold, left for the viewer to discover at leisure.