Exhibition: Painting Freedom: Indian modernism and its rebels

This exhibition presents the emergence of Indian modern art as a quest for cultural independence, exploring this through the work of the artists Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and Hemen Mazumdar, as well as a number of their contemporaries.

The emergence of Indian modern art as a quest for cultural independence. Yet, the three most successful of the artists of that time (Hemen Mazumdar, Jamini Roy, and Rabindranath Tagore), and whose appeal endures even today, each rejected in his own way an explicit call to rediscover the Indian art of centuries, and instead fashioned their own path that chose a universal language of art, borrowing from western academic art, Indian folk traditions, and the then contemporary expressionism.

The exhibition hopes to demonstrate the observation of Howard Hodgkin: “There is a special relationship between the identities of ‘modern’ and ‘Indian’ which is uniquely tied to the historical moment.”