From the Director's Desk
 

My dear patrons, artists, collectors, family, and friends.
 

A very warm welcome to all. We are immensely grateful for your support through the years as Alturaash Art proudly embarks on its 11th year of being in existence. It is only through your love and support that we came this far. I have always looked at art and its market in a very different prospect and always wished to take our artists on a global platform, my intention to open the wider gateway of international patrons and connoisseurs for Indian art and artists has helped me explore a lot of avenues.
 

This is our first exhibition after the COVID-19 breakdown, our Indian gallery space in Delhi opens with this unique show of historical romances called “Ai Mohabbat” by artist Pradipta Chakraborty. In a world of deep despair and the shadow of deaths due to Covid, I feel, this is the time to showcase love and humanity as the world needs it more than ever.
 

These 6 works by Pradiptaa depict different love stories to shower the love of India to the world. I thank Curator Uma Nair for her historical commentary on these works. Ae Mohabbat must be an experience that touches the hearts of the viewer in ways like never before. As the panoramic work in the show states: We are mosaics, made up of bits and pieces of life’s offerings.
 

Asif Kamal

Director at Alturaash Art Gallery

Traversing Historical Romances

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Fusing a story with pictorial elements, Pradiptaa Chakroborty redis- covers, and re-contextualises historical romances in a unique genre of modernist moorings in painting by bringing it forward with his own personal idioms.

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Ae Mohabbat unravels 6 works as the exemplification of an experimental approach to the genre of story telling. Encompassing painting, Pradiptaa creates resonant yet romantic articulations of the Indian miniaturist tradition by inserting new dialogues that are romantic but more realistic in nature. The stories of romance across regions and boundaries cast and creed form a rich archive of imagery. Not young, not beautiful but strong and full of character and vigour, perhaps older in age these characters bring us close to human reality framed in a format of gorgeous gravitas.

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His visual vocabulary engages a multiplicity of themes including translation as narrative, the exploration of deviation as a means to cultivate new associations, and issues concerning social customs, scale and time. Narrative is a central aspect of Pradiptaa’s practice. It is not only crucial to the traditional format of miniature painting, but it also appears in his engagement with the art of telling short stories in one frame. Pradiptaa harnesses the spirit of the heroines he picks, they have ruled hearts and minds for centuries.This show seeks to salute the spirit of medieval maidens who cut across societal pressures to create their own stories even as it personifies the beauty of folk traditions in story telling.

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Two legendary love stories from Punjab , one story from Bengal, one Welsh story, Mehboob Khan’s legendary Mother India, and one panoramic canvas to muse upon, Pradiptaa dips his brush into the past and picks out love stories to reflect upon .

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Curated by Uma Nair (Independent Curator and Art Critic)