No Corners: Continuing Season of Art at Tao, Mumbai

‘No Corners’ according to Tao’s Sanjana Shah, ‘is a journey that is undertaken with absolute freedom and with the power of our imagination being our sole companion.... a smooth constant creation of art merging into the wall and the mind of the viewer simultaneously.’

Yes, corners define the framework of space within which artistic expression fills itself, sometimes comfortably owing to the familiarity of the territorial boundary, but more likely restricted inadvertently. A geometrically defined space like a rectangle, square or triangle of paper or canvas bracketed between its own corners may be convenient by standard practice, but is definitely not true to the freely flowing nature of the artist’s imagination and creativity.

So, why not think out of the corners of the box and let your imaginative expression flow smoothly without having to stop and bend as soon as it reaches the corner? This thought has been nurtured and allowed to bloom in more than fifty curated works on display currently at the Window Gallery. Works of artists from different places in India like Ali Akbar Mehta, Arunanshu Chowdhury, Arzan Khambhatta, Bharti Pitre, Brinda Miller, Chippa Sudhakar, Heeral Trivedi, Ingrid Pritzer, Jaideep Mehrotra, Kalpana Shah, Kislay Vora, Mehul Rathod, Nupur Kundu, Rini Dhumal, Sameer Mondal, Shuvaprasanna, Seema Kohli, Sudhir Patwardhan and others have been displayed, exploring limitless expression in a space without linear boundaries.

One can find paintings, sculptures and other works of art rendered in corner-less outlines, be they curvaceous or jagged or undefined, at the ‘No Corners’ show. Suhas Bahulkar tries expressing the looping nature of human relationships through paintings done on palette shaped surfaces which are shaped like loop. Arunanshu Chowdhury explores the colourful art to be found in ingredients of food in the background of a circular kadhai or frying pan. Arzan Khambhatta’s sculpture uses copper wires to create a couple of humans that are inextricably entangled and enmeshed into each other seamlessly.

Brinda Miller’s mixed media artwork has the inner picture on an oval surface spilling out of its frame to give a different picture in totality. Chippa Sudhakar’s fibreglass LED light titled ‘technology vs man’ has techno gears embedded into a transluscent male head depicting the borderless merging of man and machine. The mixed media work entitled ‘bhalendu’ has the artist Kislay Vora invoking the moon’s crescent through the threads partially knitted into an arched frame. All the scenes that typify Mumbai have been staged on a black-and-yellow fiat taxi that Mehul Rathod uses to beckon the viewer to a ‘Mumbai darshan’ in vintage tones.

Jaideep Mehrotra’s work is a black and gold jigsaw puzzle where neither the pieces nor the whole picture have distinct corners, or even straight lines. Shuvaprasanna’s paintings ‘The Golden Flute’ have Krishna, Radha and his flute rejoicing in a universe of love. Kalpana Shah’s works of acrylic on canvas have free-flowing forms delineate a curvaceous landscape over a circular universe. Ingrid Pritzer seems to be exploring the textures and borders of the botanical variety in the series ‘leaves of Moriya’s garden’. Heeral Trivedi's ‘weeping willow’ has white birds flocking a tree so closely it is difficult to tell what defines the boundary – the tree or the birds. Many more works of vibrant art are up on display at the Tao window gallery, nudging the viewers’ imagination out of the comfortable corners of their minds into unfettered exploration.