Art Movement in 1970

In the early 70s, artists have used narrative devices in many ways to transform the mundane into the magical. They locate the mythic into a world of memory. They use fantasy to express personal fears and anxieties, often giving them a dream-like intensity. KG Subramanyan’s Goddess at Goalpara at the NGMA is a witty pastoral image where the four armed goddess is seen chasing the buffalo demon. On another level, A Ramachandran endows the temporal with a sense of timelessness. In Incarnation, the beautiful tribal woman, framed by the blossoming flame of the forest tree, stands on a turtle, also a self portrait of the artist.

Another artist who brought a metaphysical dimension to his images was Bombay-based Prabhakar Barwe. In Blue Lake at the NGMA, the fish form floating on the surface of the canvas and its skeletal reflection hint at disjunctive references from a dreamscape, and the realization of ultimate reality. K Khosa’s work is steeped in meta-reality. A Happening is clearly located in an imagined Kafkaesque world, in which the real takes on an eerie, unreal quality.

Madhvi Parekh’s mythic world bristles with folk and tribal imagery of Gujarat. For Gogi Saroj Pal, the mythic image is the expression of a personal mythology. It is linked to the construct of women in a patriarchal society.

A personal mythology also informs the shadowy image world of Ganesh Pyne. The experience of angst pervading the layers of existence harks to an umbral presence. In the late 60s and early 70s, Jogen Chowdhury brought into the public domain personal erotic fantasies that burgeoned with a life of their own in a nocturnal ambience.

Both Amit Ambalal and Dharmanarayan Dasgupta introduce a whimsical note into the fantasy images.

The strong mythical or fantasy content in the paintings of artists of the 70s and the 80s continued to be explored by the artists in the next decade to give a new thrust to visual language.