Contemporary Indian Sculpture: An Algebra of Figuration

The radical ideas which broke the orthodoxy in western sculpture in the early years of this century yielded a remarkable spread of technologies. This led to far freer, even adventurist developments in abstractions, figurations and conceptualisations, on the one hand, and to projects of various kinds with ready mades, found objects and varities of hardware, on the other. Interestingly, it made room for much else to happen. Taking advantage of the contemporary technologies, a line of sculptors in India advanced a sculpture that was categorically different. It was remarkably pictorial and fluent like traditional Indian sculpture, close to it in spirit, but served by fresh technologies and a distinctive workmanship. It is this development and its rare method of figuration that is presented in this book. It consists of a major essay on the subject and interviews with seven sculptors involved with the development.