The Rubin Museum of Art presents The Body Unbound. Modernist Art from India. The first exhibition in the three-part Modernist Art from India series, The Body Unbound focuses on representations of the figure and the body in modernist art from India after that nation’s independence in 1947. Exhibition on view November 18, 2011 – April 9, 2012.
S. H. Raza; Nude, 1955; 19 1/2 x 24 1/2 in.; Mr. and Mrs. Rajiv J. Chaudhri Collection
Figuration has been a long, sustained tradition in Indian art and Indian artists had already begun to incorporate secular and non-courtly figures into their works prior to Independence. Post-Independence, notions of the figure and body became connected with the creation of new cultural identities as well as the broad social and political concerns facing a new nation.
Reflecting on the predominant concerns of India’s artists in the decades after Independence, The Body Unbound considers the artistic and psychological significance of figurative modes in these paintings. As India’s artists negotiated professional, social, and political spaces for themselves in a changing nation, the way in which they represented the body continued to evolve. The exhibition will include works from the early 1940s to the mid-1980s, ranging from traditionalist representations of Indian villagers and townspeople to representations of the metaphysical “man” to the socially and politically charged narrative representations that predominated in the 1980s.
This exhibition was supported, in part, by the Vadehra Art Gallery.
The Body Unbound will be followed by Approaching Abstraction in spring 2012.
Curated by Beth Citron
About the Rubin Museum of Art
RMA holds one of the world’s most important collections of Himalayan art. Paintings, pictorial textiles, and sculpture are drawn from cultures that touch upon the arc of mountains that extends from Afghanistan in the northwest to Myanmar (Burma) in the southeast and includes Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, and Bhutan. The larger Himalayan cultural sphere, determined by significant cultural exchange over millennia, includes Iran, India, China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. This rich cultural legacy, largely unfamiliar to Western viewers, offers an uncommon opportunity for visual adventure and aesthetic discovery.
Rubin Museum of Art 150 West 17th Street, NYC, 10011
www.rmanyc.org