India Art Fair 2020: Seven works you must see

Mrinalini Mukherjee
After a major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Mukherjee has come into public light like never before. The artist, who is known for her signature sculptures made of jute and fabric, also experimented with bronze and ceramics, which will be on view at the 2020 fair.
As the daughter of distinguished artist Benode Behari Mukherjee, Mrinalini was raised in Santiniketan in West Bengal, at the heart of India’s modernist intellectual and artistic community. She then went on to study mural painting at MSU in Baroda, where she worked under KG Subramanyan.
Subramanyan’s mentorship was crucial to Mukherjee’s development, and encouraged by his celebration of vernacular Indian craft traditions, she began sculpting with natural fibres. This sparked her use of modest artisanal materials such as jute, rope, bronze, textiles and ceramic to create ‘high art’: Complex, even erotic, organic forms made by knotting, weaving, hammering and moulding.

Vasantha Yogananthan
Yogananthan will make his debut at the fair this year, with his hand-painted photographs, each of which have a distinctive colour palette, solely based on natural light. Born in 1985, Yogananthan lives and works in Paris. His photographic practice addresses the space between documentary and fiction.
His projects are developed over long periods of time, and he works only with analog cameras. Apart from the aesthetic qualities of film photography, he is deeply attached to it for its slow, almost philosophical, process.

Andy Warhol
Marking their fifth year with India Art Fair, presenting partner BMW Group India will return to the fair to exclusively showcase the 4th BMW Art Car, created by Andy Warhol with the BMW M1 in 1979. Andy Warhol is one of the 19 prominent artists from across the world to have created Art Cars using contemporary BMW automobiles of their times, all offering a wide range of artistic interpretations. This will be complimented by ‘The Warhol Talk’, with Head of BMW Cultural Engagement Thomas Girst, in conversation with Jose Carlos Diaz, chief curator at The Andy Warhol Museum.

Madhvi Parekh
Madhvi Parekh’s work underscores the rich heritage of folk traditions, such as embroidery and pichwai painting. Her lushly coloured and deceptively simple paintings reflect her preoccupation with childhood and the poetics of everyday rural life, also inspired by a range of Western influences, from Paul Klee to Henri Matisse.
Her work, however, refuses to reconcile this tension between the vernacular and the modern; instead, the artist uses her unique visual vocabulary to raise questions about how to interpret the folkloric in a modern India. Her magical, playful paintings draw from memory as well as from both Hindu and Christian religious artwork.

Pichwai Tradition Beyond Temples
On display will be a contemporary celebration of Pichwai paintings, a traditional art form with traces dating back to more than 400 years ago in India.

Ai Weiwei

Contemporary Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei’s work is sculpted in iron, cast from the roots of giant trees. Ai worked with local artisans and communities across Brazil, visiting Trancoso in the east to locate roots and trunks from the endangered Pequi Vinagreiro tree, typically found in the Bahian rainforest. Elements of these rare tree roots, some of which could be over a thousand years old, were painstakingly moulded, conjoined and then cast to create striking compositions and bold forms that reflect their Brazilian heritage.