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
Feminine, feminist
KANCHAN CHANDER (b. 1957)
Devi Nouveau 4
Mixed media on canvas board
48 x 32 inches
The torso has been central to Kanchan Chander’s work and she has imbued it with all that concerns her: The primal woman and its totemic attribution attenuated through the body proper. If these suggest a feminist viewpoint, it could hardly be wrong, even though Chander has been attracted towards the iconised popularity of cult women —Hollywood and Bollywood divas, and her own role model, the artist Frida Kahlo—whose faces feature in risible assemblages pieced together with lace, sequins and feathers.
This painstaking and laborious homage and deification does not take away from her principled stand of femininity and feminism as complementary ideologies, the one as fantasy and an object of fetish, the other as a symbol of terrific and terrifying power. For her, the body is both trade in stock as well as reverential, both brothel and altar. They question the patriarchal view of society and how women view their own body in its everydayness as well as mystique.
KANCHAN CHANDER (b. 1957)
Devi Nouveau 4
Mixed media on canvas board
48 x 32 inches
The torso has been central to Kanchan Chander’s work and she has imbued it with all that concerns her: The primal woman and its totemic attribution attenuated through the body proper. If these suggest a feminist viewpoint, it could hardly be wrong, even though Chander has been attracted towards the iconised popularity of cult women —Hollywood and Bollywood divas, and her own role model, the artist Frida Kahlo—whose faces feature in risible assemblages pieced together with lace, sequins and feathers.
This painstaking and laborious homage and deification does not take away from her principled stand of femininity and feminism as complementary ideologies, the one as fantasy and an object of fetish, the other as a symbol of terrific and terrifying power. For her, the body is both trade in stock as well as reverential, both brothel and altar. They question the patriarchal view of society and how women view their own body in its everydayness as well as mystique.
