Date:24/02/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/fr/2006/02/24/stories/2006022401700300.htm

Back Friday Review Bangalore Chennai and Tamil Nadu Delhi Hyderabad Thiruvananthapuram

Feel the golden life

RANA SIDDIQUI

Curated by Ebrahim Alkazi, the exhibition of Seema Kohli's works at Art Heritage is a statement on life.

A close view of her works reveals that not even a single space, even the size of a dot, is left empty on the canvases

A LIFELONG CHASE The deer, symbolic of the fragrance of life, is one of Seema Kohli's works mounted at Art Heritage

A year ago artist Seema Kohli showed her series The Golden Womb to Ebrahim Alkazi, veteran art connoisseur and promoter, Delhi's oldest collector of art and an extremely choosy curator. The 84-year-old man of few words didn't verbally express what he thought of her works. He just asked her in a single sentence, "When can we have a show together?"

The sensitive art aficionado chose 21 of her works. And the result can be viewed at Art Heritage, the basement gallery at Triveni Kala Sangam, the walls of which are adorned with Kohli's creations.

Grouped under the series The Golden Womb or Hiranya Garbha, these works, though an extension of her previous theme, the golden womb that is symbolic of procreation, progress and recycling of thought processes in the human mind, are now more calm, more mature, more composed, and more serene both in terms of palette and form.

Kasturi connection

Apart from her trademark use of the lotus stem, representative of the umbilical cord "that connects us all", the emblematic feminine figures and shlokas from chapter 13, mantra four of the Yajur Veda (Om Hiryanya Garbha Sama Varta Tagree) that "triggered the whole series", this time you also see a deer. This deer wears a chain, which is locked. Several keys hang in the air. And within this deer countless small deer are silently residing. Kohli explains, "This deer is symbolic of kasturi, to find which people chase it. They think that they can unlock its fragrance with a key without realising that in all of us, rests a kasturi itself; the fragrance of life."

A close view of her works reveals that not even a single space, even the size of a dot, is left empty on the canvases. "There is hardly any empty space in the universe, everything is live and vibrating around us," is the artist's reasoning. Her maturity of tones and forms is the result of rising above both intellectual and emotional efforts of creation. As all her canvases ask the question `Who Am I', the artist's journey continues in search of an answer.

The interesting exhibition continues till this coming Wednesday.