India Art Fair

Ashvita’s presentation at India Art Fair unfolds as a story of continuity, tracing how artistic thought travels across generations while remaining grounded in place, lived experience, and evolving contexts.. The narrative begins in Madras, with Modern works on paper by Achuthan Kudallur, C. Douglas, A.P. Santhanaraj, G. Prabhakar, P. Perumal, R. Varadarajan, and Velu Vishwanadhan. Among them, only Achuthan Kudallur found his early artistic community at the Madras Art Club, which he joined in 1972. The others were shaped within the studios and classrooms of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras, an environment that quietly but decisively shaped modern art in the region. For these artists, line became a way of thinking. It carried memory, discipline, and emotion, allowing each to remain rooted in local realities while embracing a modern visual language. Santhanaraj’s figurative works draw from the lives of Nilgiri women, Perumal’s imagery emerges from rural landscapes, and Douglas brings words and fragments of language into the pictorial field. Varadarajan’s practice moves slowly between abstraction and figuration, while Achuthan’s layered works on paper reveal a literary sensitivity to rhythm and pause. Prabhakar’s graphic strength reflects an outlook shaped both in Madras and through his later training at the Brooklyn Museum College of Art, New York. Velu Vishwanadhan, after winning the Paris Biennale Award in 1967, carried this language across geographies, developing a lyrical abstraction informed by a life lived between Paris and Madras. From this historical grounding, the presentation opens outward into the present. Ashvita’s showcases contemporary works by Thukral and Tagra, Raghava KK, and G. Gurunathan, artists working from distinct geographies and contexts. Their practices expand the conversation through scale, material, and conceptual ambition. Thukral and Tagra engage social, ecological, and cultural structures through layered, participatory forms. Raghava KK navigates painting, performance, and digital systems to reflect on human experience in a rapidly evolving technological world. Gurunathan transforms discarded industrial metal into meditative surfaces that echo both urban life and natural processes. Together, these works form a continuous arc, where the questions posed by modernism are not confined to history, but actively reimagined in the present.