Twentieth-Century Indian Sculpture: The Last Two Decades

In the 1980s and ’90s Indian sculpture was unusually productive of new ideas, new idioms, expressed in a radically wide variety of materials and mediums. The most significant trends, tendencies, and breakthroughs in the use of the sculptural medium are considered in this volume, with a sampling of the works of individual artists as representative of the complex whole. One of the unique features of the present volume is bringing together on one platform "high" gallery-oriented art and popular sculptural practices, the latter produced in specific socio-politico-religious contexts. While the first section has essays by young Indian art historians, critics, and theorists on the main trends in mainstream sculpture of the last two decades, section II critically views avant-garde and alternative practices, and present-day public sculpture in many states of India. The volume also features, in its final section, a portfolio of the works of twenty-seven prominent sculptors with excerpts from the writings of art critics and statements by the artists, some contributed exclusively for this volume.