Some commendable works

THE NATIONAL Exhibition of Art organised by the Central Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, was this year held at the Chitra Kala Parishad, Bangalore. Paintings, sculptures, graphics, drawings and photographs including the award winning ones, by both young and not-so-young artistes were displayed. One could not help noticing a couple of factors which were not in keeping with an annual event which is considered prestigious. Firstly, the Parishad did not seem to have received on time for distribution. Indifference showed in the way titles and names were printed.

According to a couple of elected members of the Central Akademi, who were present there, the event was not above groupism and regionalism. As mentioned by them and local senior artists, while it could not be said that all the winning works did not deserve prizes, there were some obviously good works which were denied the award, such as those by Prasanna Sahu with a fine graphic quality, Ompal Sansawal, Raj More and M.S. Rawat. It was odd that the metal work of an Executive Committee member was given an award - this was not within the norms, it was said.

Some award winning works were so unmistakably like commercial craft, it was surprising that they were even considered. Until a few years ago, selections were done from original creations. These days it is done from photographs of the work. How can one get the real feel of the quality of the original from a printed version? In fact some of the reproductions of paintings and prints looked far more interesting in the catalogue than in the original.

The exhibition was not quite representative of a national image. There were far too many entries from Tamil Nadu and not all of them were of good quality. Practising artists of Karnataka were unhappy that their State was not given representation.

Some good award winning creations were M. K. Puri's mixed media `Voice of Silence' with faces, masks and heads, raising a question of identity, a large charcoal untitled drawing by Gautam Kar, showing wild boars and chimpanzees chasing a man as if in a fight for survival, Santosh Varma's `Painting with light,' and the mixed media sculpture `Unveiling the self' by Janak Narzavy. Of those winning `Honourable Mention', Jaya Vivek's `Ballerina' and Shekar Kanade's serigraph `Green Gate' attracted attention. From Tamil Nadu besides the somewhat derivative bronze by Sivaramakrishnan an award went to Karunamoorthy and `Honourable Mention' to D. Ravi.

In terms of technique, approach and concept some commendable creations had come from Vipta Kapadia, Muralidhar Rai, Prakash Patil, Shruti Gupta Chandra, Umashankar, Abhishek Srivatsava, Sneh Mohan, Niloufer Seth, Sashikant Pawar, B.R. Ravi and Jayant Gajera.

LAKSHMI VENKATARAMAN

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