17 Centuries of South Asian Art at Frieze Masters 2024
From 4th-century Hindu sculpture to modernist photography, discover the South Asian artists who revolutionized creative culture at home and abroad
From 4th-century Hindu sculpture to modernist photography, discover the South Asian artists who revolutionized creative culture at home and abroad
Frieze Masters coincides with ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’ at the Barbican – the world’s first show to explore this period of cultural upheaval – as well as a major solo display at Tate Britain by Indian artist Balraj Khanna.
Across stand-out solo and curated gallery presentations, this year’s edition of the fair sees a focus on South Asian artists, featuring Nasreen Mohamedi, Balraj Khanna, Maqbool Fida Husain and many more. Together, these exhibitions weave an rich, diverse and expansive history of 1,700 years of South Asian art, with a particular emphasis on the international exchange that underpins much of 20th-century Indian art.
Prithvi is revered in Hindu mythology as the mother of all of Earth’s life forms, nurturing the fertility of the land and feeding its people. The Bust of Prithvi, forged from copper alloy in the 4th–5th century in Ghandara – spanning present-day north-west Pakistan and north-east Afghanistan – emphasises her maternal quality. This figure is one of 35 sculptures in stone and bronze from India presented by Carlton Rochell Asian Art (New York).
For its Frieze Masters debut, Tenzing Asian Art (San Francisco, Hong Kong) presents Himalayan Buddhist paintings and sculptures spanning the 9th–15th centuries. A highlight of the exhibition is a rare, large Tibetan scroll painting (thangka) of Buddha Vairocana, dating from the 12th–13th century. Painted in resplendent gold and bedecked in jewellery, Buddha is surrounded by an entourage of 12 adoring Bodhisattvas. Beyond its devotional function, the scroll served as a visualization of enlightenment, with the wheel of Dharma – the teachings of Buddha – visible on Buddha’s palms and the soles of his feet. Artists from across Asia flocked to present-day Bihar and West Bengal between 750 CE and 1200 CE to learn the artistic traditions of the Pala dynasty, the influence of which is seen in this scroll’s intricate figuration.
Centuries later, Paris was the magnet for curious creatives. Grosvenor Gallery (London) maps the migration of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group to the French capital at the beginning of the 1950s. Across paintings and archival material, the exhibition explores the environment of exchange that developed Indian modernism to combine indigenous aesthetics with contemporary European tendencies. The practices of Sayed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Syed Sadequain, Akbar Padamsee and Nepali painter and scholar Lain Singh Bangdel all evolved in this period: Raza embarked on geometric paintings of French towns and villages, while Sadequain’s painting became increasingly expressionist and Fauvism seeped into Padamsee’s work.
When cubism found its way to Indian shores, it took an entirely different direction: an increasing sense of freedom in India transformed the fragmentary, almost brittle, qualities of European cubism into lyrical, fluid forms. DAG’s (Delhi, Mumbai, New York) exhibition ‘20th-Century Indian Modern Art’ demonstrates this experimental approach, highlighting early works by tantra painters Biren De and G. R. Santosh, Sri Lankan modernist George Keyt, and Bengal masters such as Prosanto Roy, Paritosh Sen and sculptor Ramkinkar Baij.
The curated presentation at Aicon (New York) looks at these decades from across the Atlantic, spotlighting six South Asian artists who travelled to New York between 1963–70, supported by Rockefeller Foundation grants: Natvar Bhavsar, Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni, Ram Kumar, Mohan Samant and Raza. The heady atmosphere of art-making in New York, in which disciplines of painting, poetry, performance and film collided, prompted fundamental change for most artists. Raza appears again, now further into his journey towards abstraction, having abandoned a desire ‘to construct a tangible world’. For other South Asian artists, this time abroad was influential but not catalytic: Husain, who also features in the Barbican exhibition, made a brief foray into abstraction while in New York, but reverted to a more figurative approach upon his return to India.
Husain was also a key mentor to Nasreen Mohamedi, inviting her to travel with him to shoot his film Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) in the desert of Rajasthan. Returning to India from Europe in the early 1960s, Mohamedi pulled away from the figurative tendencies of post-independence style to forge her own minimalist visual language. Unlike her drawings and paintings, Mohamedi’s photographs were not exhibited in her lifetime. In Spotlight at Frieze Masters, Volte Art Projects (Dubai) presents 26 of her photographs from the 1970s. Mohamedi’s subjects range from sea swell to road markings; all inhabit a duality of surface and depth. Revelling in the exhilarating potential of line, light and dark, Mohamedi extends the abstract reach of photography.
Coinciding with a solo display at Tate Britain, London (24 June 2024 – 21 April 2025), Balraj Khanna is the subject of Jhaveri Contemporary’s (Mumbai) exhibition in Spotlight. Entirely self-taught, Khanna painted immersive canvases with shapes and figures unanchored within rich expanses of colour. Centring on Khanna’s paintings from 1965–67 – a revelatory period for the artist, just arrived in London and recovering from a serious road accident – the presentation reveals his interest in performance, derived from what he called ‘the theatre of the natural world’ and infused with childhood memories of street entertainers in India.
‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998’ is at the Barbican, London (5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025)
‘Balraj Khanna: Theatre of the Natural World’ is at Tate Britain, London (24 June 2024 – 21 April 2025)
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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Main Image: M. F. Husain, Autobiography Pechwai, n.d. Oil on canvas, 1.5 × 1.8 m. Courtesy: Aicon
