Soul Searching

The venue is continents away from the place of origin, in the US, at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).

The quest is for the abstract in Indian art. The means are 20 works of art that span 15th century to 20th century. The venue is continents away from the place of origin, in the US, at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).

“This installation uses traditional devotional images of Hindu gods and goddesses as a way to unlock concepts of the abstract in
Indian traditional and modern art,” says Sona Datta, PEM’s curator of Indian and South Asian Art, who has curated the exhibition titled “Figuring the Abstract in Indian Art”.

Borrowing from PEM’s Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Leo Figiel Collection of vernacular metal sculpture and the Tina and Anil Ambani Collection, the exhibition provides glimpses into how representations altered over time and yet remained rooted. “By looking at bronzes figures, of Shiva or the mighty warrior Durga, we understand that Hinduism provides a vehicle for ordinary mortals to access the divine and the universal. This idea is approached alternately in modern art through painters like Biren De, who express the essential notion of the divine through pure abstraction,” says Datta. Among the modernists, she also has Tyeb Mehta’s dejected figure and MF Husain’s 1951 oil, Man, where millions of people seem to occupy the artist’s board, even though there is a central figure in the frame.

The show, at the Wheatland Family Gallery, closes on May 31, 2015.

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