Dec 21 2024 to Jan 11 2025 10:30 a.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Gallery Sumukha

24/10, BTS Depot Road, Wilson Garden 560027

Event Description

About the show:

“Every colour and hue easily mix with that of earth” says Devu Nenmara the 62-year-old artist whose paintings convey intense intimacies and intimations arising from Earth. Devu is from Nenmara, a remote village in the Palakkad district of Kerala, where she lives and works, and has brought up her family. A labourer, she strayed into painting late in her life, accidentally or by chance, during covid times, when she was confined to home. With the materials her artist son Unnikrishnan provided, she began experimenting with painting. For her art was a natural extension or expression of her life till then, one that is deeply rooted in her village, its flora and fauna, people and landscapes. The layers of darkness and light, flashes of wisdom and beliefs, traces of festivities and rituals, rhythms of seasons and labour of her land animate her earthy imagination. She is from a traditional weaver family and has an instinctive feel for colours, shapes, lines and patterns. Starting with gouache drawings on art paper of trees, animals and landscapes, she moved to acrylic and canvas, to paint the verdant and pulsating forms and figures of life, nature and object-world around her. 

This debut exhibition of her works is also a visual jugalbandi of sorts along with the works of her artist son Unnikrishnan, whose works, apart from their deep entanglements with nature, are also profoundly inspired and provoked by contemporary concerns like identity politics and ecological thinking. Though mother and son belong to the same topos and share similar existential and environmental anxieties, their aesthetic and formal strategies, as to their approaches towards form, symmetry and balance, colour tones, detailing and levels of abstraction, diverge. This exhibition showcases the creative expressions of artists from two generations, of a mother and son, of a woman and man, of a professional and an instinctive artist, of two ways of looking and feeling, figuring and colouring.