“My paintings show eternal space, deep and absorbing,” said Prafulla Dahanukar, once, speaking about the quintessence of her medium-spanning practice. For seven decades starting in the 1950s, she deployed oils, prints, sketches, and murals, distilling a vision of her ‘eternal space’ across forms and gifting its colors to her audiences. Over this process, she became one of India’s leading abstractionists, developing a profoundly original, gestural syntax for seeing figures, landscapes, and the lived textures of the world. In Dahanukar’s work, we discover a maker for whom “feeling is paramount.” 

Prafulla at the Jehangir Art Gallery is a major retrospective curated by Beth Citron, currently Curator of Modern and Contemporary Asian and Asian Diaspora Art at the Asia Society Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation. The show traces the journey of a luminous Indian abstractionist, laying a track for her artistic development, holding not merely her virtuosic post-figural ‘mindscapes’ to the light, but the entirety of a career of which these works were a culmination. The exhibition surveys Dahanukar’s early prints, sketches, and murals, their experiments with bodies and their surroundings, then turn to the colorful ecological abstractions of middle age, marked by swells of color, before looking, finally, to the sublime horizontality of her later years, a distillation of a lifetime’s artistic endeavor to get at the essence of space itself.

On the occasion of this celebratory exhibition, marking a decade since Dahanukar’s passing, Asia Society India Centre presents a conversation that touches upon the core themes of the exhibition. Art historian Savita Apte and Prafulla’s daughter Gopika Dahanukar, along with curator Citron, will unpack the artist’s multifaceted and expansive practice, opening a window into her early inspirations, her unique use of space and material, her interdisciplinary interests and the intersecting trajectories of her personal and professional life. 

SPEAKERS

Beth Citron is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Asian and Asian Diaspora Art at Asia Society Museum, New York. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, was a recipient of an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019, and authored a course on modern and contemporary Indian art for MAP Academy in Bangalore. She was the founding Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York from 2010-19. She is Consulting Editor, Arts at STIRworld. 

Gopika Dahanukar is an artist, singer, and the Founder-Director of Swahansa Expressive Arts India, a collaborative institute of the European Graduate School’s Arts, Health, and Society Division, Switzerland based in Auroville, South India. She also serves as a trustee of the Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation, which supports emerging artists and drives social change through the arts in India.

Gopika holds an MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (USA), a Certificate in Social Innovation from UPEACE, a Diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy from Vancouver Healing Arts (Canada), and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies from the European Graduate School (Switzerland). With over two decades of experience, her work focuses on arts-based interventions that build interconnectedness and nurture a culture of care through creative expression. 

Savita Apte started her career as consultant expert for Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art at Sotheby’s and instituted the Sotheby’s Prize in 1998, awarded to an emerging contemporary Indian artist.  She left Sotheby’s to run an art fund which invested in emerging art. Apte was one of the originators of Art Dubai which she ran until 2017 whilst also initiating the not-for-profit organisation Platform Projects in 2011 based in Singapore. In 2009, Apte was co – respondent to the 53 rd Venice Biennale and an associate for the exhibition Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

From its inception in 2006 until 2015, Apte oversaw the Abraaj Group Art Prize, The Abraaj Corporate Collection, The Rose Collection and various publications relating to the collections.  Until 2020 Apte, advised two global corporates on their corporate collection strategy. Apte was Chair of KHoJ International Artists Organisation, which she stepped down from before starting her PhD. She continues to be on the Advisory Board of AlSerkal (Dubai) and Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong).

She is currently a Ph. D. candidate.