Celebrating Asian Art

Meera Mukherjee: Life in all Things

April 28-May 26, 2023 at Akar Prakar, Delhi

“I belonged to a country which also had a great tradition of its own. It was the heritage which had in a thousand ways folded me. And, so though I was at the moment living, learning and growing in the West, I should still find my own way to myself, rooted in the great Indian tradition.” —Meera Mukherjee

On the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of artist Meera Mukherjee, Akar Prakar presents ‘Meera Mukherjee: Life in all Things’ to celebrate her life and works.

Meera is unravelled as “the woman behind the metal,”as a woman of flesh and blood. In the initial years of trial and toil, she started turning each pebble to a new path and no trouble seemed enough for her at one time. This exhibition is dedicated to remembering Meera and her genius, her commitment to her art, through the various mediums that she used during her journey as an artist, from wooden dolls to ceramic tiles, plaster of Paris to carvings on marble and terracotta works both large and intimate, drawings and paintings and finally her sculptures in Bronze which defined her artistic practice and which she struggled to create in spite of her financial constraints. She would often plough back the funds she received from her sale to create more sculptures. We know that Meera often gave these away as gifts and was shy of asking for the price of the work and would sometimes use the weight of the bronze to define the price of the sculpture! Such was the simplicity of Meera. With passion and love, Meera brought rhythm and music, devotion and dedication, into everything she created. Through her art, she sings to us the theme which is life.

Manish Pushkale: Consistent (in)consistency

April 14-May 17, 2023 at Akar Prakar, Kolkata

For his latest exhibition 'Consistent (In)consistency', artist Manish Pushkale presents an extensive series of paintings deepening his enquiry into his ongoing exploration of deriving visual forms to soundscapes.

Working with large and small-scale formats, Pushkale's canvases are reflective of the textures of his background. Hailing from Bhopal, Manish is a self-taught artist who developed his practice as an artist at Bharat Bhavan’s creatively fertile environment. Evolving his artistic language over 25 years of practice, in his paintings Pushkale experiments with the imagery, working at the intersection of the personal and the spiritual.

The series of paintings presented in this exhibition is a result of his current enquiry. Playing with the notion of abstracting the auditory, the compositions transcend the tangible language of sound as we perceive them to be. This exhibition is evidence of the evolution of Pushkale’s artistic research while he remains faithful to his paintbrush, his preferred medium of choice.

—Siddhi Shailendra

Ganesh Haloi: A space left behind

D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi
Ganesh Haloi (born 1936) is a Kolkata-based artist, born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the Partition of India. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work as it did on some other painters of his generation. Since then his art has exhibited an innate lyricism coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts. He has been a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971.

He has participated in several group exhibitions in India, Documenta 14 at Athens & Kassel, Greece/Germany; Architecture of Life, at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives at BAM/PFA, Berkeley, California; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and over the edge, crossing the line five artists from Bengal at KNMA, Delhi.