'Neither Earth, Nor Sky': Master abstractionist Shanti Dave's retrospective to open at DAG

Over 80 works capturing India's first major abstractionist Shanti Dave's journey from figuration to abstraction will be showcased at an upcoming exhibition at DAG art gallery here.

Starting from July 15, "Shanti Dave: Neither Earth, Nor Sky" by curator Jesal Thacker will feature Dave's oeuvre, including larger than life abstract paintings, a style he matured over several decades, alongside a range of archival material on the artist.

Accompanied by an eponymous book edited by Thacker, the exhibition includes Dave's rarely seen early figurative works made under the tutelage of NS Bendre and KG Subramanyan at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda -- which he joined as part of its first batch in 1950 -- as well as his beeswax and encaustic canvases and layered watercolours.

The retrospective, spanning from 1950 to 2014, also highlights Dave's role as a printmaker and muralist.

Drawings, collages, and relief paintings in mixed media are other mediums that find a place in the exhibition and show the artist's range and mastery over mediums and materials alongside large paintings from the 1970s — a period when he made his award-winning paintings that won him a gold medal at the third International Triennale-India.

It is also the first time that Dave's black-and-white graphic watercolours on the Indo-Pak war are also being publicly exhibited.

"He was India's first major abstractionist to incorporate beeswax into his practice and his encaustic paintings often appear like sculptures in relief. The indecipherable scripts in his paintings appear to me like history having a conversation with itself. A quiet, inward-looking person, Shanti bhai doesn't talk much about his art, leaving the interpretation to art writers and scholars who find his work as mysterious as it is intriguing," said Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG.

Investigating the artist's unparalleled style and technique, "Neither Earth, Nor Sky" studies his unique visual language that had started with what came to be regarded as a stylised form of Indian figurative painting.

Dave's abstract iconography, beginning in the early 1950s, adapted to modernism as he altered, rejected and improvised the images into resonant forms resembling an ancient script.

The retrospective will come to a close on September 10.