Aicon Gallery Presents Modern Folk The Folk Art roots of Modernist Avant-garde 4/29

The Aicon Gallery presents Modern Folk: The Folk Art roots of Modernist Avant-garde, featuring works by Sakti Burman; K Laxma Goud; Nalini Malani; Jamini Roy; Ravinder Reddy; Nilima Sheikh; KG Subramanyan; J Swaminathan; and T Vaikuntam

This exhibition examines the point of convergence and intellectual synergy between the (Western) Modernist avant-garde movement and (Indian) indigenous and tribal folk art: K Laxma Goud's works deliberately hover between indigenous folk art and Picasso's use of non-Western tribal imagery; Sakti Burman segues seamlessly between Hindu visual imagery and Western avant-garde explorations of the unconsciousness; Indian and European mythologies are both referenced in Nalini Malani's work. Modernity thus is not located in a privileged Western narrative, but paradoxically in that set of references which was for a long time air-brushed in Western art history; non-Western, indigenous art traditions.