Contemporary Indian and Pakistan art is becoming increasingly visible in the global art scene. We decided to take a closer look at it. Here are 15 contemporary Indian and Pakistani artists who have caught our attention recently.
She is a visual artist, working with paintings and large-scale installations. Her autobiographical and surreal works explore concepts such as nature, harmony and truth. She spent her early years in Kolkata, surrounded by nearby forests, hills and its diverse flora and fauna. Because of that she was strongly influenced by the transformation of lush jungles of her childhood home into concrete townships. She uses natural materials to create images of overlapping forms that resemble cave paintings. Chakravarty has won numerous awards, including the Gujarat Lalit Kala Akademi Award, the Second Bharat Bhavan Biennale Award, and the Bombay Art Society Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Chandigarh Museum and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
He is considered to be one of the most important Indian painters of the 21st century. He has made an immense contribution in inspiring young artists of India. Jogen Chowdhury had developed his individual style after studying at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In his most famous paintings he uses ink, watercolor and pastel. Chowdhury’s recent solo exhibitions were presented by Kalakriti Art Gallery at ICIA, Mumbai and at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. His works were also presented at Gajah Gallery in Singapore, and at the Fine Art Resource in Berlin.
She is a contemporary artist working across painting, sculpture and installation. Her artistic practice demonstrates an unwavering relationship with the body, and its narratives, as well as the nature of things. Kher is inspired by a wide variety of sources and practices of creations; it prompts her to use readymade in a board arc of meanings and transformations. Her work appears to move through time; she uses reference as counterpoint and contradiction as a visual tool. She participated in many solo and group exhibitions across the world. Her works are in the collections of Tate Modern in London, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
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Bharti Kher -
Bharti Kher -
Bharti Kher -
Bharti Kher
Piyali Sadhukhan is a mixed media artist. She uses found objects in her practice, engaging with layers of meaning and memory. Her work addresses the individual, moving towards elusive, ethereal notions of form. The artist’s solo exhibitions were held at Akar Prakar in New Delhi. The chief shows with her artworks include: “Urban Narratives” – a show at Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo in 2012 and “MODER KONO DESH NAI, MODER KONO DISHA NAI,” at Forum Schlossplatz in Switzerland in 2015. She received a Junior Research Fellowship from the Government of India in 2007 and 2008. Over the past 12 years she has been gaining experience as an artistic director and set designer through her involvement in over 85 theatrical productions.
She is a visual artist who works with paper weaves, performances, installations, drawings, and video pieces. She describes herself as a “memory collector”, as her personal and family stories of the Partition strongly influence her artistic practice. The identity of the paper plays a significant role in her creation process; documents like photographs, maps, letters, postcards build up her works, but she also involves her body in asking questions of culture, politics and a postcolonial identity through performance. Akhanda participated in many exhibitions in and outside the country, in places such as: Emami Art gallery, Ganges Art Gallery, Art Exposure.
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Arpita Akhanda -
Arpita Akhanda -
Arpita Akhanda
He is an artist known as an accomplished landscape painter who was able to evoke metaphysical essences in the ordinary landscape. His Metascape series from 1978 marked the transformation of his style: a gradual shift from realism to abstraction. Since then, Haloi has made a significant contribution to constructing an abstract current in contemporary painting, creating a kind of abstract way of representing nature that goes way beyond visual documentation but conveys the poetry of nature. He had numerous exhibitions in Kolkata, Melbourne and at Bose Pacia Modern in New York. Haloi received the gold medal from Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata in 1963-64 and 1970.
She is a visual artist. She often focuses on the fleeting nature of city spaces, which seem to be abstract: rather than portraying a particular architectural space, they deal with the experience of interacting with a particular landscape. Niyeti’s work is a search for the ephemeral and visionary in the slowly and surely transforming urban landscapes. Her solo exhibitions were presented in various venues, for instance Gallery Latitude 28 in New Delhi, Studio X in Mumbai,or Queens Museum of Art in New York. She is a recipient of several international residencies, including The Gasworks International Studio Residency (London, 2019).
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Niyeti Chadha Kannal -
Niyeti Chadha Kannal
He is a visual artist whose works are based around a new medium: handmade miniature terracotta bricks. He calls them a transformative entity, which are transforming his thoughts of a miniature painter into a sculptor and sprouting his interest in architecture. Coming from a broken family, his works revolve around his desire to search for a personal space to call his own. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Pakistan, India, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Bahrain and the United States. He was awarded with guest residency in Rijks Academy in the Netherlands in 2012 and Riwaq Art Space residency in Bahrain 2013.
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Noor Ali Chagani -
Noor Ali Chagani -
Noor Ali Chagani
He is a trained geologist, who also studied art at the Art College in Bhopal. He is one of the most highly regarded young painters of India today. Pushkale’s art is inherently connected to mythology, without being obviously referential to it. However, the themes and symbols in his paintings come to the surface on a closer look, giving his art different meanings. He had fifteen solo exhibitions in the country and abroad. He participated in nearly seven hundred group exhibitions in India and abroad. He received the AIFACS Award, the Ministry of Culture’s Junior Research Fellowship and the Artist-in-Residency from the Governments of France and Italy.
He is a visual artist known for his unique landscape paintings inspired by the barren, laterite soil surrounding Santiniketan. He explores and expands the old genre of landscape painting, adapting it to new ideas and methods. Showing an experimental approach to both style and medium, his work reflects his love for nature, which is being threatened by the expansion of modern tourism and urbanisation. He exhibited his work in a solo show “Occupying Space” at Art Exposure Gallery in 2021 as well as in many group exhibitions, for instance at the Ganges Art Gallery or at Arts Acre Museum in 2020. Latua received Dhi Support Grant in 2020 and National Garhi Scholarship in 2017.
Debashish Paul
He is a visual artist who, through sculpture, performance, video, and drawing, explores issues of queer identity in a society dominated by heterosexual norms. His goal is to expand and explore the tabooed concept of homosexuality by exposing the body, treating it as a tender landscape and generating new references to queer identities. He creates sculptural dresses by pasting multiple layers of thin paper, drawing, sewing and weaving. In 2021, Paul was one of the winners of theshow “Of Liminal Beings and Other Spaces” at Emami Art in Kolkata, India Artist Relief Fund, Students’ Biennale in Kochi, Kala Sakshi Workshop, and the series “Learn Togetherness, Beyond Binaries: Sensing Art through Queer Lensing” at Kolkata Centre of Creativity.
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Debashish Paul, The hands are unable to touch you -
Debashish Paul -
Debashish Paul, Beyond The Body And Gender II -
Debashish Paul, Beyond The Body And Gender I
Prasanta Sahu is a painter whose work is based as much on the selection and juxtaposition of images as on their technical manipulation. He uses images from everyday life and places them in a different context. His images function as performative gestures, connecting the world of art and society. Sahu participated in numerous national and international shows, such as Response at CIMA art gallery in Kolkata, Project Tihar at Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi or the 7th Bharat Bhavan Biennial of Contemporary Indian Art 2017 at Bharat Bhavan.
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Prasanta Sahu -
Prasanta Sahu -
Prasanta Sahu -
Prasanta Sahu
He is a visual artist who has recently moved on to more sophisticated research into the subject itself. Humour and satire constitute an undeniable trend in his work.The objects that the artist most often creates are intentionally incongruous.The aim is to question the structure of the construction of form and visuality, and thus the very process of making the meanings, since they are never complete when they are fragmentary.The artist’s works are crafted in a way that never reaches this completeness in meaning. He was awarded with the Merit Award for Gujarat State in 2017. He participated in exhibitions at galleries like Priyasri Art Gallery in Mumbai, Knots Experimental Art Space in Baroda or Gallery OED in Kochi.
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Chandrashekar Koteshwar -
Chandrashekar Koteshwar
She is an artist whose work particularly addresses the cosmic mystery of open space, light, and time, which are both elusive and cannot be easily ‘boxed’ or compartmentalised. She is passionate about textures: dots, dashes, splashes, directional strokes and streaks create her particular style. Her works provoke a deep state of meditation. During her long career as an artist, she exhibited, among others, at BK Kunstforum in Dusseldorf, Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum in Cheltenhamand, National Gallery of Modern Art and Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan.
Her work was also featured in the 9th Norwegian International Print Triennial Norway in 1989, the Bharat Bhawan Biennial India in 1988, and the 15th Tokyo Biennale Japan in 1984.
She is a painter, printmaker and installation artist. Her work is largely non-figurative and concentrates on the relationship between people and nature, as well as the social and metaphysical condition of the agricultural worker. She grew up spending a lot of time with her grandparents in the countryside – a visit she considers the source of her fascination with nature and the inspiration for many of her artworks. The artist’s work has been exhibited in India, South Africa, Australia, United States, and the Netherlands. She is represented by Talwar Gallery, which has exhibited her work in New York and New Delhi. Shambhavi’s artworks are permanently part of the MoMA collection in New York.
