This intimate art exhibition celebrates accessibility and community at Forum Art Gallery

At Forum Art Gallery, a deliberate proposition unfolds: 1 × 1 of a Kind – Edition II brings unneurotic 23 artists from the Progressive Painters Association (PPA) successful a small-format accumulation that resists spectacle successful favour of intent. 

Rooted successful the bequest of the Madras Art Movement and the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, the amusement revisits an thought archetypal championed successful the 1970s: that art, erstwhile scaled down, tin question further into homes, hands, and mundane lives. Paintings, sculptures, metallic reliefs and drawings look present astatine an intimate size, without diluting the seriousness of the signifier down them. The archetypal variation of 1 × 1 of a Kind was held successful 2018. 

Dedicated to the representation of precocious creator M Senathipathi, laminitis subordinate of Cholamandal and a long-serving pillar of the PPA, this variation of the accumulation is simply a memorial successful art. It reflects a corporate content that creation should stay accessible, sustained by community, and shaped by shared work alternatively than marketplace excess. “My begetter ever believed that creation should conscionable radical wherever they are,” says Saravanan Senathipathi, the existent president of PPA. “Dedicating this accumulation to him felt natural, due to the fact that the thought down it comes from the aforesaid belief,” helium says. 

“Working successful a tiny format changes the mode you brushwood the work,” says Shalini Biswajit, laminitis of Forum Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition. “It becomes much intimate. You walk much clip with it, alternatively of being overwhelmed by scale.” That shift, she notes, besides opens up the anticipation of collecting, peculiarly for those encountering elder artists whose larger works often stay retired of reach. By bringing unneurotic established figures and younger practitioners wrong the aforesaid dimensions, the accumulation levels the field, allowing signifier and intent to instrumentality precedence implicit size. 

Established artists specified arsenic Akkitham Narayanan, C Douglas, P Gopinath, SG Vasudev, V Viswanadhan, Anila Jacob, and Maria Antony Raj accommodate long-established ocular languages to a reduced scale, moving crossed painting, sculpture, metallic alleviation and mixed media. Alongside them are artists from aboriginal generations, including Hemalatha Senathipathi, Saravanan Senathipathi, Brindha S, Priya Gopal, Jacob Jebaraj, and Suchithra Gopinath, whose works bespeak personal, worldly and conceptual explorations shaped by the aforesaid corporate environment. Seen together, the accumulation offers a compact but layered presumption of practices linked by shared histories, yet marked by chiseled creator trajectories.

Works by M Senathipathi anchor the exhibition’s affectional centre, wherever mythological figures look not arsenic distant deities but arsenic quality presences. “Even erstwhile helium worked with gods, helium ne'er treated them arsenic gods. He ever saw the quality constituent first,” says Shalini. That sensibility carries into the works of his daughters, particularly Hemalatha Senathipathi, whose tiny copper and brass sculptures echo her father’s aboriginal signifier portion intelligibly lasting isolated from it. Elsewhere, Akkitham Narayanan pares his meditative geometry down to its essentials to make works that reward stillness. In contrast, C. Douglas’s works summation a consciousness of closeness astatine this scale, asking the spectator to dilatory down and enactment with them. 

Taken together, 1 × 1 of a Kind – Edition II resists the impulse to perform. Instead, it asks for attraction that is measured, patient, and personal. At Forum Art Gallery, the accumulation affirms a presumption agelong held by the Progressive Painters Association: that standard request not dictate seriousness, and that art’s worth is not defined by spectacle oregon scarcity. 

1 × 1 of a Kind – Edition II is connected show astatine the Forum Art Gallery until January 22.