New Delhi, Jun 14 (PTI) Artworks by veteran and younger artists, including SK Sahni, Shobha Broota and Reshmi Dey have explored abstraction as both a historical idea and a constantly emergent art practice at group show, "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss".

Curated by Myna Mukherjee and on display at India International Centre, the intergenerational show features artworks from seven artistic bodies of production that are in conversation with imminent geometric abstractionist Sahni's body of work spanning five decades.

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Artists Puneet Kaushik, Anumeha Jain, Harshit Agrawal, Adil Kalim, and Indranil Garai & Associates have featured their works across a broad range of mediums and materials, including paintings, drawings, prints, glass-blown sculptures, AI explorations, site specific installations, recordings, music and food art.

“The exhibition intersects works that vary in their force and aesthetic complexity, their heterogeneity, even incoherence, but together embrace a radical contemporary moment in the present that allows for a more nuanced reading of abstraction in both form and philosophy,” Mukherjee said in a statement.

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Working in abstract expressionism, Kalim embraces his identity as Muslim queer person and insists on prompting queer aesthetics to reconsider its preferred means of self-representation for a more nuanced conversation about form as such.

Similarly, Dey's body of work explores glass as a biomorphic form in a large format work that speaks to Sahni's biomorphic forms, in a three-dimensional format. The delicacy of glass is explored while bringing to the medium a multiplicity of physical and emotional qualities.

Broota's "woven paintings" are an exploration of colour and texture as she stretches knitted wool over canvas, producing intriguing patterns and subtle variations that create a sense of rhythm and a complex, meditative surface.

The abstract nature of expression through fabric manifests in her work that touches upon her deeper exploration of herself through mediums like thread, wool and other materials.

It is this aspect of Broota's work that connects up to Sahni's work capturing the conversation with minimalism, materiality and biomorphic form.

While Garai's work brings a minimal expression to form that is geometric and precise yet illusionistic, all aspects that are essayed in Sahni's more recent work, Jain's work engages in internal exploration of form that speaks well to Sahni's biomorphic period where the formlessness of colour and form leads to an exploration of energy.

Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), reflects in an essay about Sahni's work: "He has spent more than five decades of his life, chasing the line as his constructive tool to create his world of geometric abstractions. One is aware that a straight line does not exist in nature. It is an abstraction, something invented by humans as a tool for measure, delineation, rendition and expression."

"For Sahni, it is an extraordinary tool to envision the beauty of form and structure by defying the conventional sense of the picture plane, with a single vantage and vanishing point and the line of horizon," she said.

The exhibition will come to an end on June 18.

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