Upon entering the Art Heritage gallery in Delhi, viewers are introduced not to an artist but a medium that has largely remained underappreciated and undervalued in India. Believed to be one of the oldest art forms, a wall lists the commonly used terminologies associated with printmaking and its foremost practitioners in India. “The goal of the exhibition is to restart a conversation about printmaking and tackle some misconceptions about prints, such as they being simple reproductions. A combination of artistic creativity and scientific methodology, we are looking at the print medium from an alternative perspective in this exhibition — exploring the various stages of the printmaking process and the artworks that emerge along the way,” says Tariq Allana, associate director, Art Heritage. There is a briefing on how to read the details of the captions before embarking on understanding the over 50 works that comprise the exhibition “Untouched, Backwards and Under Pressure”, which is on till October 20. Comprising artist proofs, unique edition prints and matrices, the gambit ranges from established printmakers such as Jai Zharotia, Rini and PD Dhumal, to younger artists such as Aban Raza, Rajesh Deb and Jagadeesh Tammineni. Representing the renowned modernists, among others, are lesser-viewed works of Arpana Caur and Gulammohammed Sheikh. Known to respond to his socio-political surroundings, here we see Sheikh’s engagements with the medium over the years, from Riot (1971), recording the violence, to Meanderings (1990) that appears to share introspections. Also finding a symbolic place in the exhibition is Devraj Dakoji’s Rock Series (1977) that Allana informs belongs to the series exhibited by Art Heritage during its inaugural season in 1977. If Seema Kohli’s Mahavira (2014) is a zinc-plate etching based on the life of Mahavira, the 24th tirthankara, Kavita Jaiswal’s “Edinburgh India and me” series belongs to a juncture when the artist was moving from figurative to abstraction. The cover image on the invite, meanwhile, is Kanchan Chander’s A Chilean Man (1979), made when she was a guest student in printmaking at the College of Art in Santiago, Chile. “It is a beautiful medium with an element of surprise, given the artist can’t exactly predict the details of the final outcome,” says Delhi-based Chander. Allana decodes the title: “When the print is created, at the exact moment of making, it is untouched by human hands, as the ink from the matrix transfers to the paper/canvas/other surface. It’s backwards because the image on the matrix is itself reversed, and it is under (controlled) pressure as it goes through the press.”
