Vadehra Art Gallery celebrates 25 years with a major exhibition curated by Gayatri Sinha bringing together successive generations of Indian artists. Incorporating The Drawing Wall, the exhibition presents four generations of outstanding art practice, through leading artists who work in different media and contexts.

Ideas of the Sublime and The Drawing Wall draw upon the twin sources of studio practice and artists’ dialogue. The exhibition marks a response to the present age of flux. The idea of the sublime, which draws on the twinned emotions of great awe and great fear is located in both ancient and contemporary philosophy.The sublime, according to the German philosopher Schopenhauer, could be beautiful or malignant, but it always creates a sense of awe.

In a global climate beset by doubt and economic uncertainty the exhibition Ideas of the Sublime seeks to restore to art its centrality in human experience. In a period devoid of heroism, we may return to the sublime – a concept that extends from Greek philosophy to digital technology – as lying at the core of artistic expression.

The Drawing Wall brings to the larger exhibition a sense of the artist, his or her materials and methods before the white cube became universal. Its central display will be a wall of drawings, that revisits the exceptional draughtsman skills of the Modernist generation. The Drawing Wall records the artist’s engagements with the figure, mythos and the phenomenon of urbanism.

Image: © Paribartana Mohanty, Vadehra Art Gallery