Three Moderns

In the coming together of three of India’s moderns, this mélange of sculptures gives form to the beauty of the human figure and face, as well as to imagined encounters with the rituals of everyday living.

Himmat Shah’s vision makes the banal wondrous and the human head unusual, sometimes even curious. Krishen Khanna, the 100-year-old “Last of the Progressives”, with his quartet of Bandwallas, is informed by his own position as an artist of deeper intensities and observations. Thota Vaikuntam celebrates the aura of being Dravidian with his patinated bronzes that explore the everyday idioms of the ritual Telangana folk with festooned foreheads. At the centre of the works of all three Indian masters is the absorption of life’s lived idioms and the confluence of time in a meeting of modern materials.