Nine Women Artists: From Sensual to Amorphous

Women artists in the Indian art scene have traversed a journey from realist and figurative to formless and amorphous. Irrespective of being woman artists, the themes and ideas range from feminine to feminist, from spiritual to urban, from anthropological to individualistic, from sexual and corporeal to abstract. The diversity of this collection resides in that the artist’s vantage point oscillates from themselves or even as the onlooker, subverting their personal into political.

(FROM SOLO EXHIBITION : The Self in Making). In the context of early Indian Modern art, Amrita Sher-Gil stands apart as holding her own among the few women artists of that era. Born in 1913, and home schooled in art by her Hungarian-Jewish mother and Punjabi Sikh father, Amrita explored drawings and painting from a very early age. Amrita as a teen was able to develop a keen eye and attitude for her own individual style: the self-portrait. She lent a certain performative edge to her own personality being fully aware of her feminine charm and enigma, which easily got translated on the canvass. One finds impressions of European masters in her style but her infallible portraiture as an Indian woman, embracing the mask of womanliness made all the difference. Ironically then and rightly so, parallels are drawn between Amrita Sher-Gil and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo(1907-1954). One can find traces of commonalities not just in self-portraiture but also self-attuned and fearless womanhood. By 1930’s, she had developed a significant body of work which left an indelible mark on the Indian modern art scene which comprised predominantly of male artists.

(FROM THE EXHIBITION Seven Contemporaries) If the there has been a woman artist trying to subvert the female body in order to trick the male gaze using banal objects as well sacrosanct paraphernalia, it has to be Anita Dube. Trained in art history and criticism at Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, Dube’s art practice has evolved to be multifarious making use of discarded objects, photography, performance and poetry/text. The beginning of her career had been infused with active art criticism and writing being involved with the formation of Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association(1987) which was based in Baroda and whose manifesto was written by Dube herself. Post disbanding of the group, she got increasingly invested in art making and her own individual practice. Using a vast variety of materials including raw flesh and mediums like text and performance, she expressly devises her art installations responding and intervening into urban architecture. She has been widely exhibited in Indian as well as foreign shores. Recent solo exhbitions worth mentioning are “In Her Own Language”, Vancouver Art Gallery, Perth, Australia; “Misdemeanours”, Rochbund art Museum, Shanghai, China and a few at New York and New Delhi. 

Trained in Painting at England’s Newcastle Polytechnic, Bharti Kher practices in India with a plethora of mediums. She has worked with the readymade, abstract installations, image making of hybrid forms, and incorporated mythological references hinting upon magic realism. Her installations are often integrating space with the method of juxtaposition to create a larger than life effect. She achieves abstraction with her ‘Bindi’ work where she uses them in a large number to sometimes narrate a fluid imagery inspired by the sperm whale, or sometimes to depict a sedentariness of a white elephant.

Born in 1977, Ranjani Shettar is a Bangalore based artist who is trained in sculpture. Neat and aligned are the words that come to mind looking at Ranjani Shettar’s work. Evolving a signature style by incorporating a multitude of materials like scrap metal, silicon rubber, beeswax, beads, pins and other such everyday objects, she continues to inch towards and oscillate from phenomenological to metaphysical.

If someone can be rightly handed the title of an artist-activist working majorly with the Indian feminist movement, Sheba Chhachhi is perhaps who comes to mind the first. Her medium of art making has been documentary photography, film-making and often has delved into installation art as well. She has worked extensively on women issues and those relating to urban transformations in the social and environmental context. From raising awareness about the presence of the violence meted to women in Kashmir to taking up issues of human rights, justice violations and environmental damages in Bhopal gas tragedy, Sheba Chhachhi is one of those artists for whom art was not merely celebratory of their womanhood but also shared a strong solidarity with women from all walks of life.

Lending an apocalyptic dimension of abstraction to the character of a woman tied to home and hearth is Sheela Gowda, trained as a painter and practicing as a sculptor and an installation artist in Bangalore, India. Working with and utilizing a vast array of materials, Sheela reminds one of a householder woman consistently building and perennially unfinished structure.

Mrinalini Mukerjee or ‘Dillu’ as she was known to art world remained a non-conformist throughout her life. Her desire to break with all form of convention and constraints in terms of material and method was only matched by her sparkling absurdist humour. Dillu could bend iconic hemp to her will forcing it to take on a monumental artistic sensibility away from the ‘craft’ quality that her early critics dismissed her with. Her choice of material was considered weak and un-sculptor like. She had a remarkable ability to set things on their head, making them quirky, contrarian, political objects. She had the power to conjure up secular gods and organic bronzes. She has participated in many distinguished group shows and has held several solo exhibitions too. Some of her other solo shows include Palm Scapes, Nature Morte, New Delhi, (2013); Lava, Gallery Espace, New Delhi (2010), Sculpture in Bronze, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2007) and Mrinalini Mukherjee Sculpture, a touring Exhibition at  the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, Oxford to name a few.

(FROM THE SOLO RETROSPECTIVE A View to Infinity) Beyond the women who were exploring unfathomable vastness of the feminine form, there was an artist like Nasreen Mohamedi who was keen to renounce from the enchantment of that very form itself. Nasreen Mohamedi was born in 1937 and emerged as a pioneering figure in the Indian Modern Art establishing herself as one of the masters of Abstraction along with a few lot of male artists like V.S Gaitonde.