Contemporary Indian Artists paint India in many hues –furious, bold and rapturous at one end, soft and magical at the other. Modern India is a kaleidoscope of colors, and our able painters display those very colors that make India the country that it is, most vividly. Imageries are literal and the themes forceful and relevant. No wonder that today Indian artists are much respected and revered.
These capable artists use techniques from all over the world to convey Indian experiences and sensibilities. The most admirable quality of these artists is that they show a keen awareness of the conditions around them while not forgetting their legacy. They are socially conscious, responsible proponents of ideas and not just pretty pictures. If one has to choose a single word to describe Contemporary Indian Artists it has to be “eclectic”.
Some important Contemporary Indian Artists
India has a galaxy of successful and well-appreciated painter. Each and every one of them displaying body of works, which can be considered a genres by themselves. If M.F.Hussain delights us with his lines, Bikash Bhattacharya has the colors of dawn and dusk in his palette. Anjolie ela Menon has delighted art lovers around the world with her aural paintings.
Listed below are some of these stalwarts:
M.F.Hussain
Maqbool Fida Hussain is one of India's best-known painters, and indeed one of the highest paid too. His works first caught attention when he was a young man in his twenties; today he is considered the grand old man of Indian Paintings. Magbool Fida Hussain's rags to riches story is stuff legends are made of. He started off by paintings cinema hoardings and continued to do so until his works were displayed for the first time in Bombay. After that there was no looking back. Hussain went on to become the highest paid painter in India and some of his works have fetched as much as 2 million dollars at Christies Auction. His series on horses and actress Madhuri Dixit, are some of his best known works.
Anjolie Ela Menon
Gayatri Sinha says of Anjolie Ela Menon that -“Her panoply of figures, as they appear, signify non-space and non-time…Like a wanton fabulist, Menon brings accretion, division, conjunction to play upon the conventional image…. Menon insists on the location of the past in the present. Her painting argues against cultural amnesia.' Indeed Anjolie Ela Menon transcends the barriers of past and present with remarkable and almost poetic ease. Menon in her paintings creates an India, which is rich and colorful, and yet questioning of the static state of equation. Her work has garnered unanimous respect from different art circles of the world.
Bikash Bhattacharya
Bikash Bhattacharya is essentially a painter of women. His appreciation of female beauty is best depicted in his portraits. A versatile artist he experiments with his mediums- oil on canvas, tempera, oil on board, pastels on board, watercolor, crayon and pencil. His Calcutta landscapes capture the city in many moods he is well known for his predilections for forms. Most of his images are established in terms of tones rather than lines. Realism is his forte.
Another interesting aspect of his paintings is that he creates characters rather than just images. Bikash Bhattacharya and his works have brought many laurels to the Indian artists fraternity.
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