Image and Imagination: Five Contemporary Artists in India

Contemporary art in India has begun to receive recognition for the innovative spirit of its inspired images. Over the last thirty years, recent works challenge the conventional perception that only the legacy of India’s past is worth consideration. Like a tree that digs its roots deep into the earth, art today grows organically, astonishing us with its vitality. Images grow out of the imagination, being transformed through past associations and personal experience. The subliminal, the psychic, the nature of human existence is metamorphosed through this wondrous gift of the artist’s creative impulse. This book, being an inquiry into the creative process, is based on interviews with five significant artists of our time: Meera Mukherjee, Jogen Chowdhury, Manjit Bawa, Arpita Singh and Ganesh Pyne. They articulate, through words and through images, their personal sensibility and a particular worldview. Their vision may find resonances from myth and archetype and technique; yet it is never imitative. Through exploration and experiment, these artists have each arrived at a language of expression uniquely their own; and this language has contributed in some seminal sense to contemporary art in India. These chapters explain the meaning of originality in its true sense: as the fusion of the new and the old, the forbidden and the familiar–to discover from the worn-out, new images that subvert the original implications–leading us to fresh insights on life and its values today.