Pensive portraits – The Hindu

The ongoing exhibition ‘Unedited, Like An Afternoon Dream’, at Vadehra Art Gallery, brings together the finest names in contemporary and modern art. While abstraction has its own amorphous aura in the world of Sachin George Sebastian’s Impossible Size of Nothingness and Shailesh B R’s Riverbank , it is the human portraits with their lucidity and lithe strokes that steal the limelight at the show.

Benode Behari Mukherjee’s pair of masterly portraits of feminine fervour on rice and regular paper are a quaint study in the power of drawing. Poise and allure both sit gently in this pair.

Atul Dodiya defines a distinctive stealth in abstracted portraiture, and we glimpse a set of works that capture the human gaze in multifarious ways. Atul’s portraits have a cadence of unfolding currents that makes the viewer think of the pulse of time. The colours and the textural nuances invite viewers to engage with his richness of sensitivity  intimately responding to human perceptions and perspectives.

Portraits on display at the ongoing exhibition Unedited, Like An Afternoon Dream at Vadehra Art Gallery
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

There is a single portrait of Anju Dodiya by Atul, that bridges a feminine layered past with its evolving present and demonstrates how in a singular portrait there can be convergence of art, place and, time.

Zaam Arif’s  portraits   explore themes of memory, transformation, and continuity, reflecting on a seamless dynamism. The artist mirrors the power of presence and the works encourage direct engagement, inviting viewers  to experience art in real time and be fully present in the unfolding moment.

Conversations in time

Portraits on display at the ongoing exhibition Unedited, Like An Afternoon Dream at Vadehra Art Gallery
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

The beauty of the exhibition lies in the narrative that hinges on history, memory, and contemporary experience fostering a poignant connection to human identity and ever-changing reality.

The exhibition has been structured as a visual thought experimentin two parts:abstraction and portraiture. It  explores a philosophy of the image following the relationship between representation and truth, reality and human consciousness. 

The portraits are built on myriad moods of narrative context and offers viewers the freedom  to interpret multiple meanings. In this adroit selection of faces frozen in time, viewers get to see a series of portraits in which the real becomes a novel story, woven into unknown corollaries.

At Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony; Till July 18; 10am to 6pm