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Jyoti Bhatt: Parallels that Meet
Jyoti Bhatt (b. 1934) is one of India’s acclaimed artists, whose artistic oeuvre spans painting, print-making and photography. An alumnus of M.S. University of Baroda, he studied painting under N. S .Bendre, K.G. Subramanyan and Sankho Chaudhuri (1950-56) and later joined as faculty in the same university. Experimental in medium and material, his artistic sensibility was shaped by creative experiments that drew inspiration from The Bauhaus, European modernism, American Pop Art, and indigenous cultural practices. He was honoured with national awards in 1956 and 1963 respectively by the Government of India. In 1961, Bhatt received an Italian scholarship to study painting and etching at the Academia di Bella Arti in Naples. In 1964, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship which was followed by the Rockefeller grant to learn print-making at the Pratt Institute in New York. From 1966 - 1995, Bhatt was involved in documentative photography of the folk and tribal traditions of India while simultaneously practicing print-making in Baroda. These photographs have both anthropological and aesthetic values and Bhatt’s interest in documenting indigenous traditions was inspired by K.G. Subramanyan’s pedagogical concepts to contextually study the crafts. His numerous photographs record the visual culture of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, apart from nature-scapes and candid shots of his friends and colleagues. Bhatt received several other awards in the course of his career and was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award (Distinguished Photo Artist) in 2005 by the Academy of Visual Media, New Delhi. Jyoti Bhatt resumed painting in 1996 and is a significant artist of our times whose work evokes a relational aesthetics between the urban and rural arts and also popular cultural practices, casting a critical eye on the dualities of contemporary reality and the human condition.
In this presentation, Jyoti Bhatt will talk about his drawings, paintings, prints and photography and the discussion will focus on the key areas as below:
• Reading the dilemmas of East and West in the 1960s and 1970s and encounters with the changing nature of art practice in India.
• Re-examining old forms and practices and their relevance within new circumstances.
• Baroda as a laboratory for creative experimentation and fresh ideas.
• Elaborate upon cross-media experimentation and crossbreeding of visual imagery, emphasizing the artist’s developments in print making, painting and photography. This may include the play of text and image in articulating the visual form.
• The artist as a juggler with a bag full of visual tricks laced with wit, humour and satire.
• Jyoti Bhatt’s art practice as it relates to the presence of and essence of the nature of Indian contemporary reality.
Discussant: Roobina Karode (Art critic, educator, writer and curator)
Roobina Karode is an art critic with post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. She is an educator, writer and curator, involved with the teaching of Art History, both Indian and Western at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, National Museum Institute, College of Art and the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. She was the co-curator from India, representing the Indian section at the First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan. In 2000, she was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship and was placed as a Visiting scholar at the Women’s Leadership Institute, Mills College in California. She also curated ‘Resonance’ a show of 20th century California painters and sculptors from the Mills College Art Collection.
As a critic, she continues to contribute essays and reviews to art journals and the Art India Magazine. Roobina has written extensive monographic catalogues on contemporary Indian artists across generations and for cross cultural collaborations representing Contemporary Indian art in Hungary, Norway and Japan. Her curated shows include ‘Negotiating Matters’, ‘Excavations and Evocations’ on Himmat Shah’s terracotta sculptures, Living on the Edge: Works of Three Contemporary Artists’, ‘The Naked Line’, ‘Parallels that Meet: Paintings. Prints. Photographs by Jyoti Bhatt’, ‘Still-Life- Adaptations in 20th century Indian Art’, ‘Counterparts: Recent paintings by Rameshwar Broota’ and ‘Frame, Figure and Field’. She has recently co-curated a travelling exhibit on seventeen women artists of India at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, USA, titled ‘Tiger by the Tail, Women Artists of India Transforming Culture’. Her current assignments are in the capacity of an author for two sponsored monographs accompanying retrospective exhibitions on the art journeys of Himmat Shah and Rameshwar Broota.
Supported by: HIVOS