Mumbai News: Jehangir Art Gallery Hosts 'Figures And Forms' Sculpture Exhibition By Tapas Sarkar And Neeraj Gupta
Mumbai: The Jehangir Art Gallery is currently hosting an evocative sculpture exhibition titled Figures and Forms, featuring the works of two acclaimed Indian sculptors, Tapas Sarkar and Neeraj Gupta. Curated by noted art critic Nanak Ganguly, the exhibition opened on May 13 and will run until May 19, 2025.
The sculptures of Tapas Sarkar and Neeraj Gupta are a veritable feast—intimate and sincere explorations in bronze and marble. They represent the verve and felicity of two sculptors who reinvent a sculptural universe. Each piece is fantastical, magnificent, and collectively forms one of the most engaging and eloquent sculptural ensembles.
Such dialogue is a continuous process; it has little to do with past concepts of edification and instead emerges as a vital process—a landscape where we become familiar with the changes influencing our lives. This exhibition signals how an eclectic range of imagery from the evolving world of postcolonial India has become instrumental in developing a visual language of collage and citation. In turn, this acts as a cultural force, negotiating and creating space for the sacred, the erotic, the political, the modern, and beyond.
The creations of these two master sculptors span a vast artistic space with masterful aplomb—Tapas Sarkar’s exceptional skill in bronze, and Neeraj Gupta’s expertise in Makrana marble and metal. Each artist, along with their practice and method showcased in this exhibition, conveys the essence of their language, life, and success. Their work unfolds an epoch and provides a profound and timeless understanding of their artistic practice—complex in patterning, yet graceful, precise, and contemporary.
These works scrutinize the living reality, offering a diverse but direct confrontation with art from different positions. The contrasting styles of these two major sculptors create an overwhelming and dizzying experience for the viewer—exciting in its tension. This aesthetic distance lends the narrative a double edge. We are at a crucial juncture here.
Their practices are meditative, explorative, and creative, incorporating carving, sculpting, assimilating, drawing, and engaging their full artistic potential to create remarkable works of art. The staging of otherness and transformation embodied in these sculptures reveals essential aspects of a fictional universe. These works disorient the spectator, who finds themselves torn between received ideas and emotions—disassembled by each sculptor’s verve and language. This is a visual text seized with desire, mirth, and resemblance.
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