Latest news with #UmaNair
Time of India
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Krishen Khanna at 100 is a testimony to time
Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE Krishen Khanna who turns 100 years on 5th July 2025, has over 70 years , engaged the social, historical and political landscape of exhibition that unveils in the city of Delhi on Saturday at ITC Maurya consists of works done between 2023 to 2025. Humans as subjects Humans have been his leitmotif. His most candid and eloquent work, Refugees Train Late 16 hours, (1947) exhibited at Saffronart , is a lasting frame of India's partition. His compositional clarity of the railway platform blends into a poignant intense sadness and pathos. Inspired by Life Known for his many series, his son Karan Khanna considers the Christ, Rumi, Music and the Bandwallahs to be his finest. Reminiscing over his poignant bandwallah series, at the Kumar Gallery in 2001, Krishen said , he was moved by Chaplinesque situations which involve dual emotions. The bandwallahs for him have been a relic of the past now reduced to an anonymous appropriation. His historic Bandwallah exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery London ( 2015) , put the spotlight on individuals who contributed to society in humble ways. His use of colour and brushwork made the mundane rise to the synergy of the creative. More recently his Bandwallah sculptures have been created as monumental entities. Residue of time The residue of time remains submerged in Khanna's art and the pathos of the haunting past, pulses in his famed Music series was born in Madras when he was posted at the Grindlays bank and he listened to Carnatic concerts .Krishen the music lover told me last year he would go for western music concerts with F.N. Souza , on his travels to London. For him art is a discipline that invites chance. Between paintings and drawings, it is his passionate precision that resonates. His Mahabharata , Rumi, Truckwallahs and Music series all become pages of the past brought forward. Benediction on the Battlefield, derived from the epic Mahabharata spelt magic in 2016, one of his most epic exhibitions was held at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi. Voracious reader, Biblical series At the same show was his Pieta. Krishen revels in the power of the narrative .The Pieta for him was not born of realism but born of the human emotive quotient has always been the most important part of the recording of many of his series born of Biblical narratives. Krishen's most epic work is the mural The Great Procession at ITC Maurya in was created with the help of students from the Jamia Millia Islamia University. The Great Procession' a hand-painted marvel, was created in the 1980s, and it took nearly four years to complete and was designed in the form of a Buddhist rock-cut cave with multiple perspectives. Krishen's mural is a fusion of the Mauryan past with the period of the 1980s – its freshness and richness of Indian cultural roots, stands testimony to his aesthetic and his appetite for creating a work of depth and originality. It also has famous people from Delhi one of them being the author Khuhswant Singh. One of his closest friends, the artist Jagdish Swaminathan penned the pulse of Krishen Khanna best : ' From the series on the truck — the ramshackle juggernaut hurtling into space piled up with construction materials and brutalised labour, to the generals and politicians negotiating peace around the table with the skeleton of humanity lying under it, to Jesus and his betrayal, to the cacophonic irrelevance of the marching band, Krishen has been preoccupied in his work with the state and fate of man in our times.' In his larger quest, politics and identity remain fluid. His paintings constitute a powerful psychological engagement, a document of the passage of time in modern India. Biblical themes have been a part of his repertoire because he loved reading the Bible. His Last Supper, Garden at Gethsemane, Betrayal, Christ's Descent from the Cross, Pieta, Emmaus and The Raising of Lazarus are all his love for a universal idiom of peace. Krishen the wordsmith , has written many essays on his friends. Tyeb Mehta's first catalog essay was written by him. Krishen has also written about his friend Jagdish Swaminathan for the Lalit Kala Akadami journal. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Time of India
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Musee Mattise, and a painted museum-quality lehenga
Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 35 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE Jayasri Burman, India's legendary woman artist who celebrates the fertility of the universe within, in her works, has over 40 years, created a vocabulary that journeys through various environments that encourage or require stillness. From fertile ponds and waters and riverine flows to many a lotus leafed oasis that captures depth and gravitas within feminine fervour, here is art born of mythos and Bengali literature. More than a garment Her painted lehenga for Radhika Ambani's aashirwad was more than a wonder and today it reaffirms the interdependence of man and nature. Aesthetic beauty, meaningfulness and multiple references all come together in this epic creation. Styled by the brilliant Abu and Sandeep, this lehenga proved to be more than a garment. Distilled in the prism of a man and woman union, it is the study of a universe that is filled with realms that resemble a sacred ritual, a time for pause in a world that has forgotten how to nurture pause, a balm in the frenzied pace of our urban and digital lives. Root memories It also reminds us of the great story of the vineyard of Aeolus. In the story it is said that the earth has memory, like the vine. For us humans, it is a question of synchronising this root memory and that of the soils . In addition, the vines must respect the earth. Within the tapestry of imagery created on this lehenga that was a fruit of 16 hours every day for 30 days, the entire ensemble echoes the story of root memories born through the crucible of experiences but harnessed through an odyssey of personal explorations of Prakriti (nature) that she considers her backdrop for all her narratives. Musee Matisse at Nice In her odyssey of the lehenga, Jayasri says she was in South of France when the call came through at the Matisse Museum in Nice. She was enchanted by the different works in the chapel related to the museum. It has important works linked with the Vence Chapel: 13 maquettes for chasubles and vestments, 3 maquettes for the chapel, 2 studies for La Jérusalem céleste stained glass window and a maquette for Les Abeilles, 2 large drawings representing St. Dominic. The large drawings of the priest St Dominic impressed Jayasri the most. She says it inspired her to do the same for this lehenga as she flew back to India. Jayasri's evolution over the years has reflected her love for Indian cultural heritage, and the legacy of our textiles, and she wanted to reproduce her artistic sojourn like Matisse on this precious Indian garment. Jayasri says, Radhika said she wanted to hang the lehenga on her walls someday, so the medium had to be a long-lasting choice. She got a canvas that would flow like a cloth and that's how it was decided it would be an Italian canvas. Light and landscape Light and landscapes in rich tones within the tenor of a fertile and vibrant universe is Jayasrii's leitmotif. Like Matisse, Jayasri has developed a distinctive style characterized by strong colours, simplified forms, and a focus on capturing the essence of the environment. Within her universe of flora and fauna, the little ducks the lotus blooms and botanical brilliance; we see the intensity of the play of light as well as nature's essence as her constant inspiration. Mounting Mood magenta This is not a fabular tale but a real story of a union of two individuals who are distinctive. Anant Ambani's love for animals is seen in the landscape so deftly created with charismatic contours and expression. Jayasri says she cut 12 canvas pieces, mounted them on a ply board, and began her painting after creating the background contours with her pens. Her palette moved into a moody magenta , a tone she had encountered in previous engagements with the family. Within the medley of mood and colour we note that Jayasri interweaves moments of emotion with artistic flair — all stamped with a hidden, magical signature of the feminine form. Lehenga as a relic This lehenga will be a relic in the pages of contemporary art and couture history in India as well as the world. It reflects Jayasri's search for subjects and thematic ideologies in the framing of feminine forms and nature. It reminds us of the connection between humans and Earth transitions that lead to inviting conservation and human intervention for preservation of Prakriti. Years ago when she came to Delhi in the 1990s at her first solo at Gallerie Ganesha, Jayasri said: ' In my life, creativity has been the most important thing because creativity to me is freedom.' Now so many years hence, a year after she finished creating this dramatic lehenga she says: ' Creativity is a beautiful way of living life because you can create your own style in a different manner. It is not only about art, it is about life, about people, about everything. Creativity for me is endless. Creativity allows me to appreciate different cultures, different hearts and learn from great Indian as well as European Masters. And it also allows me to have knowledge about the impact of my own work. And that's where my inspiration for painting comes from.' This delicately created lehenga in a subtle way states that nature is the glue that holds us together and unravels its secrets in the sifting of light from the mood edits of darkness and springing works that delight the mind's eye. Indeed when hung on a wall it will be more than a mere decorative backdrop. The composition of the vivid and surreal paintings drawn from Indian spirituality and life, with the emotional charge of the work, rendered within each meticulously created form is about matrimony and memories pressed between the pages of our minds. (IMAGES :JAYASRI BURMAN STUDIO) Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Time of India
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Phaneendra Nath's Odyssey of Metaphors
Critic and Curator Uma Nair has been writing for the past 34 years on art and culture She has written as critic for Times of India and Economic Times. She believes that art is a progressive sojourn. She learnt by looking at the best shows in Washington D.C. and New York. As author her most important books are Reverie with Raza and Meditations on Trees by Ompal Sansanwal. LESS ... MORE At Bikaner House in Delhi you have to walk up to the first floor of the Centre for Contemporary Art and savour a panoramic work of Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi's butterflies in a small room to know the power and passion of this brilliant artist who trained at College of Art Lucknow. Looking at his work with his professor Jai Krishna Agarwal on Saturday became a moment of deep revelations and reflections between Guru and shishya. As the butterflies flutter over the surface of the canvas, it reminds me of the world's finest artist Yayoi Kusama's mosaic-like shards in their spread wings, each revealing exquisite patterns of orange, red, white and blue spots. For Phaneendra, the butterfly is more than a symbol of fragility and beauty; it is a symbol of service, of selfless spiritual significance, and a metaphor for man and nature. Nestled and sprinkled on pedestals in this room are his butterfly sculptures shining in modern steel and sculpted in the realms of technological finesse. The details and precision of the creatures' wings in many ways fuse with Phaneendra's own mesmeric style. Comprising an iridescent assortment of colours and hues, the sculptures bear a similarly diaphanous and lustred quality that enchants us. We gaze at the painting and the sculptures too and think of intricately tessellated backgrounds—a flattened plane of biomorphic swarms —sprawling and propagating into infinite space like cells under a microscope. Repetition is Phaneendra's elixir; he creates his own corollary with an 'all-over' method, the shapes evoking the enduring legacy of an infinite carnival of butterflies celebrating the ecological spectrum. Then in the largest room on the top floor is the man with flat wings, reminding us of an aeroplane. Whatever he paints or draws or creates with pencil and pastel, each work comes alive with unique perceptual effects. In his archetypal grim grim-looking, intimate figurative imagery, each work presents the artist Phaneendra's spectacular, pulsating vision. Phaneendra's fascination with the winged man is inextricable from his experience and appreciation of the world. ' On earth, man is only one dot among millions of others,' he says. ' We must not forget ourselves with the desires of our burning ambition. I feel that in our everyday struggles, we lose ourselves in the ever-advancing stream of eternity.' Take the lift and look at his winged man sculpture on the ground floor. Here he calls it Totem and you see a fiberglass sculpture of a man with an owl's wings. Precision and perfection tell us that this modern man in a pair of impeccable trousers is a testimony to time. The artist's pleasure in nature and its abundant variety of forms is palpable. Each individual wing, whether in a drawing on the two walls or in a single sculpture, is painstakingly rendered in both graphite as well as fiberglass. The open wings unfurl into swathes of space, exuberant in expanse. The series he has created as clusters over the last few years are delicately articulated. We must note that the artist's work became smoother, more orderly, figurative, and above all, more pensive. There is indeed a lightness as well as a gravitas to these subsequent paintings. The Good Wisher At the centre of the long corridor stands a monochromatic suited man created in mixed media on archival paper from the year 2016 titled The Good Wisher. Unpretentious and filled with a host of hidden emotions, the bouquet of flowers and caparisoned little bird on the shoulder become organic objects likely to speak to Phaneendra's own experiences as well as memories of formative fascination for both botanical as well as zoological species. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
New Indian Express
26-04-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Processing the Pahalgam nightmare
Uma Nair, Art critic, Delhi What did they gain? At the end of the day, what's the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim? Can someone be blamed for being born into a faith? It is also good to remember that a terrorist, at the end of the day, is an unemployed youth. Tourism was a way to get them to join the mainstream, get them back to being earners. I feel Pakistan does not like the proximity that India shares with other countries. The economic factor is at play somewhere. Sheuli Misra, PhD scholar, JNU, Delhi I strongly condemn the attack on Indian citizens. It points to a serious security lapse. However, this incident has nothing to do with the residents of Kashmir. As a frequent visitor to Kashmir, I've always been treated with warmth and respect by locals. My behaviour towards them won't change—in fact, my respect has only grown seeing how they have supported victims' families and helped stranded tourists. Their humanity in this moment is truly admirable. Aditya Arya, founding director, Museo Camera, Delhi NCR When I first heard the news, all my memories of Pahalgam came rushing back. I know that place like the back of my hand because I used to go trekking there. However, I believe there is always space for solidarity between nations. I've always wanted to visit Pakistan because my maternal family belonged to Sialkot and Lahore. I still have hundreds of documents and belongings from my mother's side—original diaries, accounts of how they lived in Sialkot, migrated to Lahore, and then eventually to India. But healing from what has happened will take time… I hope our government takes action to first capture these people. Syed Bashaar, Comedian, Hyderabad Honestly, none of us sitting in comfort can even remotely process the horrors of those victims. The fear and rage we felt can only be but a fraction of what's deserving of this tragedy. But we will play right into their hands if we let our attitude towards civilians change. If they killed innocents and we kill more innocents in response, we become the henchmen of our enemies. It is upsetting to see people directing hate comments towards Muslim children, using swear words and saying they are 'time bombs'. I also feel that making Ghibli art out of the victims and editing Bollywood movie scenes for this context is just being tone deaf and downright insensitive. Charu Chellani, PR personnel, Delhi 'I was in Pahalgam just three days before the tragedy to celebrate my birthday with my parents. Throughout our trip, we felt safe and warmly welcomed. Tourism remains an important lifeline for Kashmir's local families, and this attack has not only struck at humanity and peace but also deeply impacted the region's beauty and fragile economy. While I refrain from speculating on external involvement, justice must be served for the victims. I firmly believe Kashmiris played no part in this violence. It will, however, be difficult for many to travel to Kashmir anytime soon. Avishek Chanda, 29, PhD scholar, Delhi 'The selective targeting of the tourists is deliberately provocative. This is a moment that demands national unity. Pakistan's military-jihadi complex undertakes such misadventures periodically for the fulfillment of its political agenda. There must be credible deterrence against such actions. However, this incident will not change my relationship with Kashmiris. I have friends from J&K, and the bond will remain intact. Unfortunately, there have been some instances of intimidation against Kashmiri students across a few states. But that is exactly what the terrorists want – to alienate Kashmir from the rest of India. We must not walk into their trap.' K V Madhusudhanan, former IG, CRPF, and head of SPG's Close Protection Team The dastardly attack is nothing short of a ruthless aggression on the collective soul of the nation. As an Indian, it is difficult to forget and forgive. Contrast the vulgarity of asking the religion and selectively killing people with the words of Aarti, who witnessed her father N Ramachandran being shot dead. Yet to come out of the trauma, she profusely praises the care she received from the two Kashmiri Muslims. This shows the ulterior motive of communal polarisation will not work. The recent statement of the Pak army chief sounded like that of fundamentalist, so unbecoming of a soldier. The ever-improving status of India in the international platform, including several Islamic countries, has been worrying Pakistan. So waging a low-cost war – ie sponsorship of terrorism – is seen as a better option by the deep state of Pakistan, including its army. Diplomatic, military and political management of the emerging situation is needed for a lasting solution. Joel Jolly Mathews, college student, Thiruvananthapuram Pakistan is a terror factory. For decades, they have played the same dirty game. Enough! It's time for an iron strategy with teeth, not diplomacy with dimples. Keep poking the lion, and restraint becomes resolve. There should be consequences — a retaliation that hurts. We will talk of cross-cultural ties once cross-border terror ends. Every inch of Kashmir should be under the Tricolour — I am willing to bleed for it. Lakshmi Sreekumar, HR consultant and social worker, Kochi The grief and anger are intense. We lost a brother (N Ramachandran) here in Kochi. It feels personal. If this was an October-7-Hamas-style attack, we want an Israel-type action. People trust the Modi government to give an unforgettable reply. The opposition should back the government, not play appeasement politics. Antony Davis, Founder of VHT Now, Bengaluru I've spent about 20-25 days in Kashmir and what I realised is that a majority of Kashmiris are the most amazing people in India. They have to go through the hardest life but the hospitality they show is something you'll remember even years later. Only a few people want to create a stir and are supported by bigger organisations; they want to damage tourism and livelihoods of people. [The terror attack] is really sad, disgusting and unfortunate but my genuine opinion is that people from India should still visit. I would definitely say that the Indian government restricting entry of Pakistanis makes sense. It's still risky to have people move across the border because you can't make out who's who and what their intentions are. Rishi Raja, Engineering graduate, Chennai I have been to Kashmir before – to Pahalgam, Baisaran Valley itself. In my point of view, the terrorists are trying to create a divide between Hindus and Muslims in India by targeting only the Hindus. What they have done is inhumane. It's not a religious act as no religion teaches terrorism. Madhu Sharma, travel influencer & marketing consultant, Bengaluru Kashmir was definitely on my bucket list and I was planning to visit in the near future because it is heaven on earth right in our own country. In the past few years, tourism has also boomed and you see so many videos online. I feel a lot of anger, mistrust and frustration. It needs a monster mind to do something to innocent people who are there on vacation with their families. Being a travel influencer, I know how excited my family is to see new places when travelling with me. Now, who knows when something like this will happen? I hope the government takes some strong action to make sure Kashmir is a safe place to travel without being worried or afraid of something happening. Naveen Kumar Pivhal, Screenplay writer, Hyderabad It breaks my heart and boils my blood. These weren't soldiers. These were innocent people touring their own country. The Pahalgam attack isn't just about Kashmir. It's about the soul of this country being attacked again and again. I'm done pretending that peace can come without accountability. I've always believed in cultural exchange, dialogue, and hope for peace — but attacks like this shake that belief. Right now, I feel we need to prioritise security over cross-border friendships. You can't keep extending a hand when the other side carries a knife. Peace can't come at the cost of lives.
