Vadehra Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition of drawings by Balkrishna Doshi, India’s only architect to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest possible accolade, and an eminent artist in his own right. The exhibition will be on view at their modern gallery space from 15 October to 12 November 2024 and features 25 black-and- white drawings dated between 2014 to 2022.
Among the few pioneers of modern architecture in India, Balkrishna Doshi has conceptualized, created and constructed over 100 buildings and spaces of varying scale and significance across the country over his seven-decade-long career, with a commitment to sustainability and supporting the relationship between place and culture. During his early career, Doshi served an apprenticeship under Le Corbusier, who was known to frequently retire to his sketchbook as he remained devoted to contemplating a productive integration of sculpture, painting and architecture in his work. Le Corbusier’s profound European influence conversed with Doshi’s treasury of Indian sensibility, bringing to Doshi’s art, just as in his architecture, a cerebral universalism that prioritizes experience and expression. Doshi has consequently created a hybrid visual language that recognizes the materiality of place, often through textures of memory, while its spirit is reclusive, ambling inwards to an immaterial, immeasurable world accessed only through personal cognitions and self-consciousness.
At their heart, Doshi’s drawings share a motive for wholesome self-expression, beginning with recognizable inspirations from Indian miniatures that evolve into abstractions of the formulism he learned under Le Corbusier. Doshi’s free-flowing compositions are steeped in a powerful push of memories from childhood as much as the philosophical questions that come up in one’s life as one ages. The surrealist nature of his works is ignited by a rich subconscious, with space, form, rhythm, material and location contributing to making memory a tool in and of itself with which to pursue the magic of personal re-discovery. In these works, Doshi’s attention to the line is practically animist in nature, through curvatures that imply a recognition of collective flow – the various movements of the hand, the body, the psyche, the intellect, as well as the movement of the line and finally the image itself. These works tend to invoke a gamut of moods, seasons and spatial movements through the means of volumes, texture, proportion, and suggestive historical and mythical situations. While expressing spontaneity and defying structure, their dream-like compositions edge towards biographical and paradoxical explorations, encrusted with remnants of memories, looking inward and outward in the same moment, as an artistic memoir of his life.
Words Platform Desk
Date 21.10.2024