“Radical Terrain”
In its two previous exhibitions on Indian modernism, the Rubin looked first at figurative traditions and then at abstraction from the decades after independence in 1947. For the third and final installment in this welcome series, curator Beth Citron has turned her attention to postindependence landscape painting, placing it alongside contemporary work by eight American artists, only some of whom are of South Asian descent. It’s a productive conversation. The Indian painters, several of whom belonged to Mumbai’s pioneering Progressive Artists’ Group, imbued local topography with Western styles (expressionist brushwork, cubist delineation of forms) to establish a painterly language for a new nation. For the younger artists, working at a moment wherein both modernist certainties and postmodern critique seem exhausted, the syncretism and dynamism of Indian modernism hold a special allure.
Some of the American artists have approached the Indian painters’ work in an oblique fashion, while others have responded more directly: Janaina Tschäpe’s abstract assemblage of geometric paper cutouts quotes the curving lines of a 1960s landscape by K. S. Kulkarni. In one case the historical and the contemporary are literally overlaid. A painting by the New York–based Marc Handelman, which depicts Rajasthani pink marble so photorealistically that it seems almost an abstraction, serves as the wall on which hangs a work on paper by H. A. Gade (1916–2001).
Not all of the older work depicts India. Just after independence the artist N. S. Bendre traveled to New York, where he painted Times Square, 1950, in expressionistic splotches of blue and brown. It’s paired here with Hasan Elahi’s Concordance, 2012, a three-screen video work that broadcasts a prerecorded loop of the New York street just outside the Rubin’s walls. Silent and monotonous, it translates landscape into a much more sinister form of surveillance—and asserts that in the last century and this one, landscape is less an idyllic genre than an undertaking imbricated with questions of sovereignty and violence.
