Palette Art Gallery re-opens with Long Story Short, a cross-generational group exhibition that explores narrative painting and varied patterns of visual storytelling, exemplified in the work of both Modernist and contemporary artists.
Established in 2001 by designers Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna, the gallery is an extension of their long dalliance with art collecting, into promoting and exhibiting. “Palette was a natural progression- a more involved and responsible way of showing art and helping cultivate first time collectors.”- Rohit Gandhi
Fifteen years on and after an interim break of three years, the gallery opens with an exhibition of artists that represents the gallery’s vision- highlighting the Modernist aesthetic, which remains rooted in the Indian political and cultural landscape alongside a more current global pulse. “The quality of art has always been paramount for us, irrespective of industry trends, genre or seniority of an artist. We take a keen interest in growing with our artists and have built lasting relationships with them as well as with other gallerists, critics, and curators. We believe in a healthy art fraternity, one that we can contribute to, and learn from”. – Rohit Gandhi & Rahul Khanna
While speaking of past shows, Palette has hosted retrospective exhibitions of important senior artists like Anupam Sud in 2007, cult shows like ‘Bombay Boys’ in 2004, a name by which the participating group of artists came to be popularly known as and first time solo shows of young artists that helped jump start their careers.
Long Story Short presents an anthology of short stories- vignettes of everyday life in India, scrambled anew from mythology, personal experiences, and memories, or from the fraught social imbalances of a growing urban populace. The artists’ canvas serves as a space to critique society as well as a space to retreat into one’s deepest thoughts and desires. Observations are woven into fiction, leading down a never-ending rabbit hole, indulging not only the artist’s own imaginations but also those of their viewers. The tension of the opposites plays out between the historical and contemporary, real and imagined in a series of works that tell tales of heroism and trepidation, power and loss, life and death. Compositionally, the works allow for various points of entry, positioning the viewer as co-author in completing a story/s. Stylistically, the works oscillate between an eccentric and ordered energy, reflecting the psyche of the human mind.
Today, we are informed by a multitude of narratives- from the news, from social media, from literature and poetry, from dance and drama, and even closed group gossip chats and hearsay. Long Story Short presents possibilities of looking inward, of introspecting and extracting our own essence of life from a range of stories. It is with this spirit to re-group and question, and ultimately celebrate stories- the material and the esoteric, the ordinary and the spectacular that Palette Art Gallery re-opens once again!
Exhibition: Long Story Short
Dates: September 02 to October 08, 2017
Timings: 11:00am-7:00pm (Monday to Saturday)
Address: Palette Art Gallery, 14, Golf Links, New Delhi 110003