An exhibition titled "Dhvani se ŚabdaurChinh” was inaugurated at National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai.
Curated by AdwaitaGadanayak and his team, the exhibition speaks to us about southern sensibilities and singular identities that were forged through scholarly adaptations, multiple skills and experiments that were seeking to juxtapose the notions of the modern with the traditional. It identifies artists who practiced in Southern states as well as artists who were born there or had family trees and moved up North to become the greatest practitioners and pedagogues.
The czar of the Madras Movement, K.C.S. Paniker – believed that an artist had to foreground tradition and cultural art forms and interpret these within contemporary sensibilities, leading to defining the regional modern particularly in Madras.
Hence, Paniker's regional modern was firmly fixed in the wedge between the visibility and identity of the southern artists nationally, and developing a visual language born of an Indian ethos – the vitality of the Indian spirit.
Historians have noted that the modernity which was established in Madras in the '60s integrated and blended pioneering visions of certain artist-teachers at the Madras School of Arts and Crafts.
The culling also includes Malayali veterans like K. G. Subramanyan, the cultural theorist, the philosopher, the art mandarin who taught seven decades of students as well as A. Ramachandran the scholar, the author, the art historian and the guru who taught a love for the immediate environment to his students.
