The Contemporary Lore at Shailaja Art Gallery explores Indian art across generations
The Contemporary Lore: Sojourn of Styles and Generations Unfurled, an exhibition of artists across generations and diverse styles and techniques, is compelling not only for the kind of art on display but also for the thought behind the show.
By bringing together 30 paintings, sculptures and mixed media by 23 artists from across India, the exhibition unfolds a living dialogue between emerging, mid-career and established artists.
“The idea is not to look at the career trajectories of the creators or place their works in a hierarchy, but to allow their varied mediums, practices, and perspectives merge like lore,” says curator Kiran Mohan.
The works were mounted in a preview at the Bikaner House this week. It was an immersive curatorial design that gave each artist’s visual voice the space for recognition.
The exhibition has shifted to a bigger venue at the Shailaja Art Gallery in Gurugram for four weeks.
“We want to have an art scape where veterans and emerging artists are showcased as equal partners, and not as part of art history in progression,” says Shailaja Jain, the gallery founder. “Art in this exhibition is not just hung on walls; it is placed as a shared visual dialogue resonating with its setting,” she adds.
The Indian art scene, points out Kiran, has long been dominated by the same set of masters on rotation. “When art became saleable, galleries sold the works of masters to make money. Somewhere along, several other senior and contemporary artists got overshadowed and did not get their due,” she explains.
So, at The Contemporary Lore, the memories, observations, vocabularies, and emotions of artists from different decades intersect and connect through ideas, the materials used and their shared concerns of where and the times we live in, and the things around us.
In this confluence of artistic voices, Jai Krishna Agarwal and Prem Singh, Charudatt Pande and Nilisha Phad, along with Ashok Bhowmick, Asit Patnaik, Bipin Kumar, Shaji Apukuttan, and several others create an impactful exploration of genres, styles, colour palettes, figures and forms to provoke the visitors’ emotions and moods.
Ashok Bhowmick’s Fowlers, a work about bird catchers, has three men in stark profile looking at their prey as a bird is perched on the shoulder of the first man. ‘But the work transcends from literal to metaphorical as the men become dream catchers looking at the bird as a harbinger of good news,” says Kiran, explaining how every work speaks its own language.
A painter of dualities, Asit Patnaik’s The World Within has a large, tonsured male head as the cradle for a female figure sitting huddled within herself. There is a meditative quality in the ‘gender fluid’ painting. Oil and acrylic images of multi-tiered abandoned rural houses in Charudatt’s The Silent Witness speak of collapse through disuse and neglect, but the painting makes them eternal in the cultural memory of people.
Harshwardhan Devtale’s aerial view of village and urban architectural spaces in water colours refines the visual art language, and veteran printmaker Jai Krishna Agarwal’s giclee print titled Remnants of the Empire, is an allegorical response to the socio-political changes in the world. There is a rhythm and harmony in the exhibition.
Art historian Johny ML says in his critical introduction, “the exhibition is an assortment of styles rooted in established approaches to art. The artists in this show clearly inhabit different worlds. In their styles, they are modernists. In their concerns, they are post-modernists. And in their lore, they are very much of the contemporary moment.”
As the modern to contemporary Indian artscape metamorphoses, galleries like Shailaja‘s are rethinking the way art is presented and understood.
At Shailja Art Gallery, Suncity Business Tower (5th Floor), Golf Course Road, Sector 54, Gurugram; On until June 13; 11am to 6.30pm.
Published – May 22, 2026 07:00 am IST
