Sagarika Sundaram @ Alison Jacques, London - "Release" Exhibition

Sagarika Sundaram: Release

Alison Jacques, London

14 October – 15 November 2025

Sagarika Sundaram

Atlas (detail), 2023 

© Sagarika Sundaram

Alison Jacques presents ‘Release’, the first UK exhibition of new work by Sagarika Sundaram (b.1986, Kolkata, India; lives and works in New York). Working primarily with raw natural fibres, Sundaram’s intuitive practice of ‘painterly sculpture’ or ‘textile painting’ defies material, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. This new body of work deepens her connection to fibre and felt; nuanced in colour and complex in form, she sculpts space as well as material, incorporating felt reliefs and glass mosaics, as well as a large-scale installation. This exhibition anticipates Sundaram’s forthcoming solo show, curated by Laurence Sillars, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2026.

‘Release’ alludes to an aliveness in Sundaram’s practice. Born out of the internal space in the body that gives rise to breath or laughter, and driven by a kind of letting go, her works take shape through embedded pockets that are cut open in a single, irreversible gesture, releasing form from within. The exhibition showcases new avenues of expression, including the exploration of glass to create wall-based sculpture. A constant across Sundaram’s experimentation is her interest in colour, as she describes: ‘there’s an alchemy to it’. This colourful ‘alchemy’ is both precise and playful, as she told Vogue India’s Radhika Iyengar, ‘a true test of a dyer is not whether you can make colour, but if you can make the same colour twice.’

A large-scale installation, suspended in the gallery’s naturally lit back space, is cut from one piece of cloth. The work transforms its environment, energising the spatial void with material encircling a central axis. Across the exhibition, works reference the mandala: a holistic concept integrating the body with itself, grounded in a flat geometric design, and structured around one central point. In its multidimensional activation through space – from wall relief to suspended sculpture – Sundaram breaks open this traditional symbol. As she observes: ‘with each new work, I develop new pathways.’ Informed by the modern dancer Chandralekha’s (1928-2006) interpretation of movement, artist Mrinalini Mukherjee’s (1949-2015) natural fibre sculptures, and Anish Kapoor’s (b.1954) large-scale investigation of matter and non-matter, Sundaram’s artwork choreographs the dynamic between the individual and the gallery space.

At age 11, while Sagarika Sundaram was a student in Andhra Pradesh, India, she experimented with textiles for the first time, specifically batik – a wax-resist technique. Two decades later, in London, Sundaram made her first felt work, cleaving it open with a knife, later describing this process as ‘cutting it open felt like discovering a secret inside’. In her studio, Sundaram transforms wool into felt through an organic process that involves a physical, embodied performance of dyeing, tearing, and compressing raw fibre. She handles material as if sketching, layering fibres like cross-hatching to make a mesh. Soaking her composition in soapy water, Sagarika Sundaram then applies pressure to fuse the fibre into its final form. ‘By the time things are humming along, the ending makes itself obvious’, she describes. ‘The work is complete when I can feel it talking to me.’

Sagarika Sundaram was born in Kolkata into a Tamil family and spent much of her childhood between India and Dubai, and now lives and works in New York. In 2020, following her studies at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Sundaram graduated with an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. She has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, New York; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize.

Earlier this year, Alison Jacques presented Sundaram’s monumental installation, Released Form (2024), commissioned by UBS, at Art Basel Unlimited, and her forthcoming solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute will open in 2026.

Forthcoming Exhibition: Roy Oxlade, Preview: Tuesday 25 November, 6-8pm

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

alisonjacques.com

Suresh Prandi @ Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan - "Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​" Exhibition

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan

Through September 26, 2025

Maroncelli 12 gallery presents the Suresh Prandi’s debut on the art scene and the power of his painting. “Spirito e spettri nel colore di Suresh / Spirit and Spectres in Suresh’s colour” is curated by art historian Bianca Tosatti. This is the first ever exhibition of this young artist. 

The exhibition will continue at the Gliacrobati gallery in Turin, in June-July 2026. 

Suresh Prandi’s works move emotions: the artist’s vision breaks the canonical scheme of perspective, in a dense carpet of pasty chromatic fields, supported by black strokes that allude to forms of human features. Suresh Prandi’s creative process is born from a meditative state during which the lines become tangled on a chromatic base stratified on many levels: in fact, as in the gymnastics that the artist systematically practices, spiritual understanding cannot be seen unless one learns the right techniques. And in this mass of matter, the eye emerges - more eyes - that attract the viewer and like magnets suck him into "lakes" of color. 

"And at once I find the eye that is looking back at me: extraordinarily large, fixed and enquiring - writes Bianca Tosatti in the critical text in the catalog -; a vortex sucking me inward, amplifying the tremors of my mental terrain; an outward explosion of my existence whose forms it shakes. And so the work becomes a subject-gaze situated in the field of the Other, because it is the image that looks at the subject".

Suresh Prandi was born on June 9, 1998 in Bangalore (India), where he spent his early years with his parents. At the age of eight he was adopted by the Prandi family and moved to Campogalliano, a small village in the province of Modena, where he still lives. He regularly attended elementary, middle and high school, graduating from the professional institute of Correggio (Reggio Emilia) in “Services for Agriculture and Rural Development”. Thanks to his idol, Cristiano Ronaldo, Suresh Prandi first became passionate about football and then about gymnastics, developing a true cult for the body, around which all his days now revolve. In 2018 Suresh Prandi began his placement at the day center of the Nazareno cooperative in Carpi, in the province of Modena (an association for the reception, care and rehabilitation of people with disabilities), where he began to express himself through drawing. Noticing his natural talent and the benefits he derives from it in terms of relationships and personal well-being, in 2024 it was decided to permanently include him in Manolibera painting atelier, where he works every day. 

The artist often uses oil pastels to create a chromatic mosaic that almost entirely covers the previously created drawing; he is a master in the combination of color that never fades into the next shade but it is placed next to it as if the hues and combinations were innate. And speaking of “Landscape with Angel”, Bianca Tosatti writes: “The colour is approached in a circumspect and yet ambitious way; weighed and divided like the cones of pigment on an Indian market stall, arranged by a wise seller so that the emotional value of each one can be perceived”. 

MARONCELLI 12 GALLERY

Via Maroncelli, 12 – Milan

maroncelli12.it

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan, May 28 – September 26, 2025

Alwar Balasubramaniam @ Talwar Gallery, NYC - Becoming Nature

Alwar Balasubramaniam: Becoming Nature
Talwar Gallery, New York
Through August 23, 2019

Talwar Gallery New York presents Becoming Nature, an exhibition of recent works by ALWAR BALASUBRAMANIAM.

The works in Becoming Nature reflect the artist’s sustained and ever-deepening relationship with the natural world—not only its landscapes or physical elements, but the forces that surround us. Working across a range of media and materials, Alwar Balasubramaniam, known also as Bala, focuses these life-giving forces in ways that make them visible and tangible—bringing the geological and elemental to human-scale. Up in the air renders the invisible process of evaporation into delicate sculptural form, for example—concentric rings of pigment condensing many long, slow moments of exchange between the object and the atmosphere around it. In a similar way, unseen movements of wind and air are recorded viscerally in the stippled, textured reliefs of Wind Field while the seemingly cracked earth surface of I was like you, you will be like me speaks to the cyclical exchange among the most basic elements of our world. Perhaps most notably, a new series of paintings present elegant and vibrantly colored panels, light and fleetingly detectable as the patterns of a bird’s plumage. The result of several processes of accretion and erasure by Bala, these paintings make beauty a matter of constant movement and transformation.

Bala invites nature into these works, as participant as much as raw material—and invites us to meditate on processes that blur the lines between art and life, the natural and the aesthetic. The works that result represent neither the total control of the artist, nor his subordination to the sublime power of nature—but rather a thoughtful negotiation of the forces that extend beyond the control of any individual. Modeling a patient, playful, wonder-filled relationship to the world we dwell within, the works here exist as states momentarily excised from the ongoing flux and flow of life—the swells and tides, soft breezes and sudden inundations, that make the living world a matter of constant, unending change. .

Bala’s interest in the natural world has sustained his artistic practice for decades, but it became particularly focused after the artist’s move from urban Bangalore to a rural part of south India over five years ago. The move allowed for an intimate, close-up engagement with nature—an understanding of its processes born of daily observation and lived, corporeal familiarity. This kind of bodily knowing has been critical to Bala’s work over the course of his career—work which seeks continuously to investigate the possibilities of the senses to capture and engage with that which extends beyond them. With searching, always-curious attention, Bala probes our perception, pushing past normal habits of seeing, feeling, and relating – making visible what we otherwise overlook in the course of our daily living. Working across media—from intimate and barely perceptible to room-size installations—Bala harnesses the potentiality of each material to work in new and unexpected ways. In every case, his interest remains steady: to open our eyes and minds, quite literally, to the world around us.

BALA’s works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; Essl Museum, Austria; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1st Singapore Biennale; and 18th Sydney Biennale. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a featured speaker at TED.

Bala was born in 1971 in Tirunelveli, India, to where he recently returned to live and work.

TALWAR GALLERY, NEW YORK
108 East 16 Street, New York, NY 10003
talwargallery.com

Modernisms @ Grey Art Gallery, NYU - Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection 
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
September 10 – December 7, 2019

Parviz Tanavoli (Iranian)

Heech, 1972

Bronze on wood base, 22 1/4 x 12 x 8 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection 

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.54

© Parviz Tanavoli

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

Drawing on its remarkable collection of modern Iranian, Indian, and Turkish art, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University presents Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection. Featuring approximately thirty to forty artworks from each country, the exhibition examines the artistic practices in Iran, Turkey, and India, from the 1960s and early ’70s via selections from the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art. The first major museum exhibition to bring together modern works from these nations, Modernisms sheds new light on how the featured artists created works that drew on their specific heritages while also engaging in global discourses around key issues of modernity. Assembled by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery, this exhibition illuminates our understanding of modern art created outside of the West.

Of the nearly 4,800 works housed at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, approximately 700 comprise the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art. This collection—an unparalleled and unique art historical resource—represents some of the largest institutional holdings of Iranian and Turkish modern art, and the foremost trove of modern Indian art in an American university museum. Along with an endowment to establish the Grey Art Gallery, the collection was donated to New York University in 1975 by Abby Weed Grey, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner” from St. Paul, Minnesota. In the 1960s and early ’70s, when few other American collectors were attuned to art being made in the Middle East and Asia, Mrs. Grey traveled extensively in these regions, steadily acquiring works by contemporary local artists. Intent on self-education and optimistically embracing the notion of “one world through art,” she believed firmly in the power of art to stimulate dialogues between people of different cultures. This vision arose at a moment when, due to the shifting dynamics of the Cold War, America held a broader interest in fostering intercultural dialogue that was motivated, in part, by foreign policy strategy.

“The time seems right to reexamine Mrs. Grey’s trailblazing efforts toward cultural exchange,” notes Gumpert. “These artworks represent a wide range of responses to unique, regional histories and to a rapidly changing modern world. Combining them in one exhibition allows viewers to understand how artists of various nationalities melded local traditions with international trends and, in so doing, identifies global art as a central component of modernity.”

Although works from the collection have been shown at the Grey on numerous previous occasions—in exhibitions such as Global Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran (2016), Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection (2015), Modern Iranian Art (2013), and Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture (2002)—selections from the Iranian, Turkish, and Indian modern art holdings have never been presented together in a cross-cultural study. Bringing together works from three different countries, Modernisms makes significant contributions to current dialogues which are actively seeking to expand narrow, Eurocentric narratives of modern art.

IRAN

Comprising nearly 200 works, the Grey Art Gallery’s holdings of modern Iranian art constitute the largest component of Abby Grey’s collection. In 1960, as part of her around-the-world tour, Mrs. Grey visited Iran, where she attended the Second Tehran Biennial. The Iran she encountered was rich with creativity and intellectual discourse. Ali Mirsepassi and Hamed Yousefi note in an essay in the exhibition’s publication that “Iranian intellectuals and artists participated in various movements and experiments as they sought to craft diverse modern, secular, and radical visions for the nation.” Captivated by what she saw, Mrs. Grey subsequently made seven additional visits to Iran, seeking art that would “express the response of a contemporary sensibility to contemporary circumstances.” She found this innovation in work by members of the Saqqakhaneh school, such as Parviz Tanavoli, Faramarz Pilaram, Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, and their peers. These artists sought to reinterpret Iran’s rich traditions of calligraphy, architecture, and ornamentation in contemporary idioms. For instance, Tanavoli rooted much of his work in Iranian folklore, but developed a new pictorial language to recast traditional stories as modern sculptures. Pilaram drew on the awe-inspiring architectural components of the mosques of Isfahan, the city of his birth, but merged them with bodily fragments to create hybrid designs. Zenderoudi referenced Shiite iconography and Persian calligraphy in his oeuvre but transformed them into abstract, flowing forms. “The major departure from earlier modernist works,” explains scholar Fereshteh Daftari, “lay not only in the representation of indigenous subject matter but also in the expression of a vernacular culture with its own visual means and lexicon.” Despite the primacy of Saqqakhaneh works in the Grey collection, Mrs. Grey also acquired works by other Iranian artists, such as Siah Armajani, who emigrated to Minnesota in 1960, and whose works in the collection are informed by depictions of language and the pictorial relationship between word and image. Also included in the Grey collection is a floral monotype by Monir Farmanfarmaian, who spent most of her career in New York (where she learned printmaking techniques from Milton Avery), and is best known for her mirrored works that recall Iranian mosaics. Like the Saqqakhaneh school, these artists grappled with questions of how to reconcile their contemporary sensibilities with their Persian heritage.

Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (Turkish)

Full Moon, 1961

Oil and glue on canvas, 50 7/8 x 42 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection 

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.293

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

TURKEY

Mrs. Grey made her first visit to Turkey in 1961, inaugurating a lifelong fascination with Turkish modernism. By the end of that year, she had begun collecting Turkish works with the intention of exhibiting them in the United States. Abby Grey returned to Turkey three more times—in 1964, 1965, and 1969—to visit the studios and salons of the country’s rising vanguard artists, ultimately purchasing nearly 110 works. While there, she met many Group D artists, including Abindin Eldergolu and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, two among a veritable roster of Istanbul’s modernist visionaries who sought to cast off earlier styles and aesthetics—such as Impressionism and Western academic styles—in favor of art representing a new Turkey, one that would embody both Turkish consciousness and international awareness. In his quest to create a uniquely Turkish modernism, Eldergolu looked to the native abstract art of calligraphy, thus foregrounding conceptual connections between local Turkish artistic forms and international modernist abstract art. Eyüboğlu looked for inspiration to Turkey’s rich pastoral life, often portraying farms and peasant activities. Other Turkish artists of this time, such as Nevzat Akoral, depicted scenes of village life and labor through the lens of Turkey’s many urban migrants. In contrast, Fahrelnissa Zeid looked to another kind of Turkish heritage—the geometric and curvilinear forms of Turkish ornamentation and architecture—which she incorporated into her often recondite images. “The mythos of the rural that was so central to 20th-century Turkish art,” writes Sarah-Neel Smith, “contrasts with works in Grey’s collection that speak to processes of migration and urbanization, which began in the 1950s and reached a fever pitch in the 1960s.” The multitude of styles found in the Grey Art Gallery’s Turkish collection reflects the great diversity of expression that constitutes Turkey’s modernist scene.

Maqbool Fida Husain (Indian)

Virgin Night, 1964

Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 29 1/2 in.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.158

Courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery / NYU

INDIA

Strongly drawn to the innovations she found in India, Abby Grey traveled there four times during the 1960s. She collected some 80 artworks, comprising what scholar Ranjit Hoskote calls a “unique group of works [that] embraces the diversity of artistic explorations, cultural alignments, and ideological perspectives that animated the Indian art scene as it unfolded between the 1940s and 1960s.” In New Delhi and Mumbai (Bombay), Mrs. Grey encountered artists who, in the wake of their country’s independence from British rule, began experimenting with new approaches, forming the nation’s first modernist schools. Several works she acquired were by members of the influential Progressive Artists Group (PAG), which broke away from the traditional Indian nationalist art movement to form an avant-garde collective that looked outward to other cultures and drew inspiration from abroad. Clearly embracing cultural hybridity, Maqbool Fida Husain blended cubism and expressionism with traditional Indian iconography to create his own vocabulary of darkly expressive forms. Francis Newton Souza, founder of PAG, often combined deconstructed human forms with Hindu iconography, merging outside influences with local religious imagery. Mrs. Grey also collected works by some of the more experimental artists working in India who have been overlooked in the West until now, but who were also seeking ways to incorporate modern techniques. One such artist, Prabhakar Barwe, combined Tantric styles culled from his time spent in Varanasi, India’s holiest city, with abstract symbolism largely inspired by the work of Paul Klee. Ultimately, Mrs. Grey’s keen eye and passion resulted in a collection of Indian art that highlights and celebrates a complex but often heretofore disregarded modernism. 

Exhibition Catalogue

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection is accompanied by a 288-page catalogue. Co-published by Hirmer Publishers and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the book features a roundtable discussion that considers the political and cultural landscapes of Iran, Turkey, and India during the time that Abby Grey was traveling and collecting art. Moderated by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the roundtable includes Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Adviser for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University, Vice Chair of the Committee on Global Thought, and Senior Research Scholar in Global Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs; Vasif Kortun, curator, writer, educator, and former Director of Research and Programs at SALT; and Hamed Yousefi, a filmmaker and PhD student in art history at Northwestern University. Also featured is a conversation in remembrance of Abby Weed Grey between Robert R. Littman, President of the Vergel Foundation and former Director of the Grey Art Gallery, and Michèle Wong, Associate Director and Head of Collections and Exhibitions at the Grey Art Gallery.

The book includes essays by Lynn Gumpert; Shiva Balaghi, Senior Adviser to the Provost and President of the American University in Cairo for the Arts and Cultural Programs; curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari; Ali Mirsepassi, Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU, and Hamed Yousefi; Sarah-Neel Smith, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art; Susan Hapgood, an art historian and Executive Director of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn; and Ranjit Hoskote, a cultural theorist, curator, and poet. The book also includes catalogue entries by Duygu Demir, PhD candidate at MIT; Ilhan Ozan, PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh; Ally Mintz, Exhibitions and Publications Manager at the Grey Art Gallery; and Rashmi Meenakshi Viswanathan, a Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Contemporary Art at Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Tour

After debuting at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Modernisms will be on view at the Block Art Museum at Northwestern University from January 21 through April 5, 2020. The exhibition will travel to the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in fall 2020.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection at Grey Art Gallery, New York University

Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
January 13 – April 4, 2015

During four trips to India from 1960 to 1968, inveterate collector Abby Weed Grey—founder of NYU’s fine arts museum—explored the vital art scene that blossomed after Indian independence in 1947. Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections from the NYU Art Collection spotlights Mrs. Grey’s pioneering efforts, presenting Indian modernism through the lens of her ardent engagement with the country and its art. The exhibition is co-curated by American art historian Susan Hapgood and Indian poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote.

In establishing the Grey Art Gallery in 1974, Mrs. Grey provided it with a founding collection of nearly 800 artworks, more than 80 of which were purchased during her travels to India. With this act of generosity, she created the most important trove of modern Indian art in an American university museum. Yet until Abby Grey and Indian Modernism, these works have rarely been seen in public as a group. The exhibition includes 27 paintings and works on paper, and one sculpture, by 20 artists. These are enriched and contextualized by illuminating ephemera from Mrs. Grey’s travels, and from her diaries, all of which are preserved in the New York University Archives.

Reflecting current interest in this period of art from India, Abby Grey and Indian Modernism complements a related exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art, After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997 (on view March 1–June 28, 2015), which highlights two defining moments in Indian history: independence in 1947, and the nation’s 50-year anniversary.

Grey Art Gallery Director Lynn Gumpert says, “In the early 60s, when Abby Weed Grey set out to collect non-Western modern art, she was intent on meeting, as she later wrote, artists who were ‘breaking with the past to cope with the present,’ and whose ‘works best mark the advance from tradition to a contemporary view.’ Her prescience and generosity have provided a fantastic resource for students and scholars from across the NYU community who are at the forefront of research on alternative modernisms. The Grey looks forward to welcoming them, as well as the broad public, to this exhibition.”

Ms. Hapgood adds, “With this project, we aim to develop nuanced understandings of Indian modernist art that will expand and complicate the existing Western-centric narratives on the subject. We are adding a new twist to the history by closely tracing the crucial role of one individual patron, and exploring the particular ways that her idealist vision overlapped with Cold War politics and the foreign cultural exchange program of the United States Information Agency, as I cover in my exhibition essay.”

In the wake of their country’s independence from British rule, Indian artists began experimenting with new approaches, forming the nation’s first modernist schools. Among the artists Mrs. Grey encountered in India were those belonging to the enormously influential Progressive Artists Group, formed by six artists, including M. F. Husain, F. N. Souza, and Ram Kumar, all of whom are represented in the exhibition. She was drawn as well to works by individuals associated with the Baroda School, the Delhi Shilpi Chakra (Delhi Sculptor Studio), Neo-Tantric art, and artists from the Kala Bhavan art school of Santiniketan. While in New Delhi, Mrs. Grey made the acquaintance of Kanwal and Devayani Krishna, active printmakers and teachers whose energy and dedication, visible in their works in the exhibition, impressed her immensely.

One highlight of the exhibition is Husain’s painting Virgin Night (1964), a darkly evocative depiction of a seated woman, possibly smoking a cigarette, with a hookah pipe and spider to her left, as a ghostly hand points down from above. Husain was self-taught, inspired by German Expressionism, and initially made a living painting movie billboards before he went on to achieve great international renown. The image of the spider, which he included in many of his works, is often interpreted to be a sign of protection, derived from an Islamic story about the Prophet that the artist heard as a child.

Mrs. Grey also met several times with Satish Gujral, a painter who spoke about his work in fluent English, and lamented the fact that there was no market for the kind of experimental art that he was making. The exhibition features Satish Gujral’s austerely abstract Christ in the Desert (1960), which Grey described as “lonely, deeply religious, hurt as only the world can hurt one who would like to save the world.” In the early 1950s, in an example of post-Colonial Indian artists’ participation in international cultural dialogues, Satish Gujral traveled to Mexico and apprenticed with Social Realist mural painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Abby Weed Grey

Mrs. Grey, who formed The Ben and Abby Grey Foundation in 1961 to support the arts, maintained extensive diaries about her travels. In them she wrote of wanting foremost to “do good,” yet as her involvement with global modernism deepened, she developed a philosophy of art as a form of trans-cultural communication, a universal language. During frequent subsequent travels, she steadily acquired work by contemporary artists from Egypt, Greece, Iran, India, Turkey, and Pakistan. Grey would eventually take eight more trips to Asia, the last one when she was 71 years old. She assembled a collection of over a thousand works of art at a time when few other American collectors were attuned to contemporary work from Asia. In 1974, Grey established the Grey Art Gallery at NYU as a permanent home for her collection, with the intention of furthering her cross-cultural approach in a global academic setting, as well as complementing NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Mrs. Grey’s interests, aspirations and vision are reflected not only in the works she collected, but also in the substantial documentation—including receipts, correspondence, catalogues, photographs, artists’ letters, etc.—preserved in her papers, which she donated to NYU Archives. Abby Grey and Indian Modernism will include selections from her archives, recording her impressions in illuminating detail.

Exhibition Catalogue

Abby Grey and Indian Modernism: Selections form the NYU Art Collection is accompanied by a fully illustrated print-on-demand book, which is also available online as a free PDF. This includes an introduction by Lynn Gumpert; an essay by Susan Hapgood that mines Mrs. Grey’s archives to paint a vivid picture of her activities and her increasing dedication to collecting; an essay by Ranjit Hoskote tracing the ways in which Mrs. Grey’s collection reflects the diversity and complexity of the modern Indian art scene during the three decades following independence; and complete catalogue entries by Rashmi Meenakshi Viswanathan.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
www.nyu.edu/greyart

Updated 09.07.2019