ARPANA
CAUR:
Between Dualities
Thursday, 5th June - Saturday, 28th June, 2003
Connection, 2002, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 82 inches
Born in Delhi, in 1954, into a Sikh family, Arpana Caur is an artist whose art has grown and developed out of the long experience of struggle to overcome adversity at both the individual and the social levels. Caur's work speaks with an eloquent intensity of the current state of women's affairs in India, resolutely refusing to look away from the many problems inherent in the present system, yet equally determined not to be defeated or overawed by them. If the experiences of Indian womanhood can be said to be the primary focus of her work, still her precisely formulated analysis of the rhythms of everyday life are so surely focussed as to have equal validity when extended even further afield. This current exhibition of work deals directly with some of the great metaphysical issues common to all mankind: youth and age, attachment and detachment, suffering and enlightenment, all foregrounded against the background of the incessant flow of the river of Time, that is itself both the creator and destroyer.
One of India's foremost contemporary artists, Caur's work is as well-known abroad as it is celebrated at home in India.Her vibrantly coloured canvases, with their instantly recognisable style that makes references to earlier Indian miniature and folk traditions, employ repeated sets of motifs in their allegorical treatment of a wide range of themes: embroidery and spinning becoming, for example, metaphors of life and creativity, while the scissors that frequently appear also, image the forces that curtail them. In many of the pieces on display, woman is portrayed as the central actor on the human stage, the one who bears life, nurtures and supports it through its long development - and ultimately defends it against the inimical forces concentrated by tragedy, greed, corruption, environmental destruction and the thousand other shocks to which humans are subject. Writing of Arpana Caur's first show in the October Gallery, in 1982, Waldemar Januszczak described her work as "sophisticated and intense ...... a rare cross-cultural success." Twenty years on, it has deepened to become yet more powerful still, the contrasts stronger, the whole expression more refined.
Arpana Caur's works are in many private and public collections both in India and abroad, including the National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Bradford Museum, U.K., Kunst Museum Dusselforf, the Singapore Museum of Modern Art and the Ethnographic Museum, Stockholm.
The exhibition is presented in association with IWA (India With Art) and Shailja Vohora.
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The October Gallery
is particularly grateful for the help and sponsorship provided by:
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