Writing for the Art World - Style and Substance : My Final Assignment

Is this a case of the Curator’s impractical ambition taking over?

Review of the exhibition ‘SHASHWAT MAHARATHI: THE ETERNAL SEEKER’ presented in National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Bengaluru, India

The exhibition was a confounding mess. It would take me one hour of painstaking exploration through the gallery’s labyrinthine architecture to grasp the complete extent of disarray. 

The retrospective began with this- unremarkable at first -bamboo support for the colorful yarn threads that weaved a delicate pattern extending into two rooms in 90-degree angles. The first room was very much a white cube with an astounding amount of text. Maybe it was a strategic foreboding of how very many artworks my senses were going to be overwhelmed by. 

I went into the room that was directly ahead of me, slightly bored, wholly disoriented. This room consisted of a few prints. None of them held much of my attention. Flying past them I entered the next room which was equally tiny and badly lit. Maybe the small structure of the room was what made the beginning of this installation, Tana Bana by Adwaita Gadanayak (designer of installations and curator), all the more impressive. 

It was terrifyingly tight quarters. One side was the wall text. The space between the wall text and the large traditional loom was less than 10 inches. In another corner, there were live studies doodled onto postcards. Cutting diagonally through the room were the threads that extended from the loom into the crucial bamboo skeletal structure. The first of many of such statuesque bamboo constructions that guided the threads in an elaborate rainbow- a colorful mirroring of Maharathi’s handwoven Bawanbuti designs -pattern throughout the gallery (Upendra Maharathi, an artist extraordinaire, article by Sujata Prasad).

Tana Bana was a homage to Maharathi. A symbol of his persistence in trying, and achieving, to revive traditional Indian art mediums, handicrafts if you must. This becomes emblematically clear in the long high ceilinged corridor where statuesque frames stood with clothes draped over them in a ghostly manner, a symbol of the dead state of the handicrafts before Maharathi’s intervention. These handloom fabrics had Buddhist motifs, patterns handed down by Maharathi (Referred to the exhibition catalog).

The corridor leads to a small room, which leads to a tinier room. In this room, which had horrible lighting (at this point please assume that all the parts of the exhibition had terrible lighting), there is a selection of Maharathi’s sketchbook pages which were in a lattice-like glass and bamboo structure. On the walls, his Birds on Bamboo series is showcased. The curatorial detail was daunting, it made me curious as to why certain parts of the exhibition held more flair than the others. It distracted from the actual work of the artist whose name was on the exhibition poster.

To access the next part of this exhibition I had to walk out of this gallery and into another building, a part of the same gallery just a different structure. On the right side, there were artworks on rice paper, I could see a Japanese influence in Maharathi’s art style. Further down there were bamboo and cane designs engineered by him. A little further, live studies of Gandhi. It had become obvious that Maharathi had a versatile education, he also had some kind of political affiliation with Gandhi and his ahimsa politics. Then I came face to face with a documentary of Tana Bana’s Installation process. 

On the left side of this structure exhibited are architecture blueprints, and artworks of village scenes. By this point, I was tired of the whiplash, overwhelmed, and deeply frustrated because I had no information about the artist apart from what I could glean from his artistic style and the range (and what a dextrously diverse range) of his works. 

And then comes the wall text with crucial historical information about the renaissance man of India. It is then that I learned that Upendra Maharathi was trained in the Bengal painting tradition at the Government School of Art in Calcutta. In the early 1930s, he graduated with distinction, moved to Bihar. Maharathi became closely associated with the nationalist movement of the period. He deeply believed in ‘Swadeshi’, it was his main motivation in revitalizing the Indian art forms, providing the vital economic stimulus in rural areas. He had studied in Japan in his search for a deeper understanding of Buddhism. He had also made vital architectural contributions in both India and Japan. (Referred to the exhibition catalog, Upendra Maharathi, an artist extraordinaire, article by Sujata Prasad)

Moving forward there were two paths, a narrow corridor that led to Tana Bana and everything that came with it, the other side held austere paintings. The Gallery sitters strictly cajoled me into the boring side. This side held artworks inspired by the life of Buddha and European style oil painting of notable figures during the fight for independence in India. 

Flying through this space I jumped to the other side. This was the side I was waiting for, the side I get to see and understand the brilliance of Gadanayak, who cared about Maharathi!

There was another installation by Gadanayak, Dharohar, a symbolism of what Maharathi was to Indian art forms. Dolls were placed in between large pieces of wood that were horizontally chopped, a space left for the dolls and a foggy projection. 

The last room was a recreation of Maharathi’s studio; the only part that felt authentic, untouched, and truly a glimpse into the artist’s life and work. This was, however, ruined for me by over-enthusiastic gallery sitters who felt the need to hover over my shoulder. Or loudly (what jarringly loud whispers they were), direct my experience.

I had gone through the exhibition all over again, this time tracing Gadanayak’s Tana Bana, completely uninterested in Maharathi. 

Gadanayak had stated this in the exhibition catalog, “… will explore the use of wood and bamboo in contemporary design which does not eclipse the beauty of the works but complements its depth, its strength and its aesthetics.” His installations did eclipse the works of Maharathi though. It shows in the attention he paid to the things that he found interesting. The elaborate lattice presentation of sketchbook pages in the Birds on Bamboo series room, his attention to detail with Tana Bana, his experimentation with Dharohar. The space these installations were given to breathe, expand, even the tiny Birds of Bamboo room. 

Or maybe this exhibition was planned for a single gallery structure (the original exhibition was in Mumbai, slated for Bihar and Odisha in the future). Making it a moving retrospective was, perhaps, a strategically bad decision because the original exhibition kept only one gallery’s architecture in mind. And only three installations.