Frieze Masters will take place at the Barbican alongside The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 – the world’s first exhibition to explore this period of cultural upheaval – and a major solo exhibition by Indian artist Balraj Khanna at Tate Britain.
In addition to outstanding solo and curated gallery presentations, the focus of this year’s edition of the fair is on South Asian artists, including Nasreen Mohamed, Balraj Khanna, Maqbool Fida Husain and many more. Together, these exhibitions weave a rich, diverse and comprehensive history of 1,700 years of South Asian art, with a particular focus on the international exchanges that characterize much of 20th-century Indian art.
Prithvi is worshipped in Hindu mythology as the mother of all life forms on earth, who promotes the fertility of the land and nourishes its people. Bust of PrithviForged from a copper alloy in the 4th-5th century in Ghandara – in what is now northwest Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan – this figure emphasizes her maternal quality. This figure is one of 35 stone and bronze sculptures from India presented by Carlton Rochell Asian Art (New York).
For its debut at Frieze Masters, Tenzing Asian Art (San Francisco, Hong Kong) presents Buddhist paintings and sculptures from the Himalayas dating from the 9th to the 15th century. A highlight of the exhibition is a rare, large Tibetan scroll painting (Thangka) of Buddha Vairocana, dating to the 12th-13th century. Painted in brilliant gold and adorned with jewels, the Buddha is surrounded by a retinue of 12 worshipping Bodhisattvas. Beyond its religious function, the scroll served as a visualization of enlightenment, with the Wheel of Dharma – the Buddha’s teachings – visible on the Buddha’s palms and soles of his feet. Artists from across Asia flocked to what is now Bihar and West Bengal between 750 AD and 1200 AD to learn the artistic traditions of the Pala dynasty, whose influence is visible in the intricate figure representation of this scroll.
Centuries later, Paris was a magnet for curious creatives. The Grosvenor Gallery (London) traces the migration of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group to the French capital in the early 1950s. Using paintings and archival material, the exhibition explores the environment of exchange in which Indian modernism developed to combine indigenous aesthetics with contemporary European tendencies. The practices of Sayed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Syed Sadequain, Akbar Padamsee and Nepalese painter and scholar Lain Singh Bangalore everything developed during this period: Raza began with geometric paintings of French towns and villages, while Sadequain’s painting became increasingly expressionistic and Fauvism penetrated Padamsee’s work.
When Cubism found its way to India, it took a very different direction: a growing sense of freedom in India transformed the fragmentary, almost brittle qualities of European Cubism into lyrical, fluid forms. The exhibition “20th-Century Indian Modern Art” at DAG (Mumbai, New York) demonstrates this experimental approach and highlights works by Tantra painters Biren De And GR Santoshand sculptor Ramkinkar Baij.
The curated presentation at Aicon (New York) takes a look at these decades from the other side of the Atlantic and puts the spotlight on six South Asian artists who traveled to New York between 1963 and 1970 with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation: Natvar Bhavsar, Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni, Ram Kumar, Mohan Samant And Race. The heady atmosphere of art-making in New York, where disciplines such as painting, poetry, performance and film collided, triggered fundamental changes in most artists. Raza re-emerges, now further along his journey to abstraction, having given up on the desire to “create a tangible world”. For other South Asian artists, this period abroad was influential but not catalytic: Husain, who is also represented in the Barbican exhibition, made a brief foray into abstraction in New York, but returned to a more figurative approach on his return to India.
Husain was also an important mentor for Nasreen Mohamedand invited her to travel with him to shoot his film Through the eyes of a painter (1967) in the desert of Rajasthan. When Mohamedi returned to India from Europe in the early 1960s, she broke away from the figurative tendencies of the post-independence style and developed her own minimalist visual language. Unlike her drawings and paintings, Mohamedi’s photographs were not exhibited during her lifetime. Headlights at Frieze Masters, Volte Art Projects (Dubai) presents 26 of her photographs from the 1970s. Mohamedi’s subjects range from ocean waves to road markings; all are characterized by a duality of surface and depth. By exploiting the intoxicating potential of lines, light and darkness, Mohamedi expands the abstract reach of photography.
Simultaneously with a solo exhibition at Tate Britain, London (24 June 2024 – 21 April 2025), Balraj Khanna is the theme of the exhibition by Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai) in Headlights. Khanna was self-taught and painted haunting canvases with forms and figures not anchored in saturated areas of color. The presentation focuses on Khanna’s paintings from 1965–67 – a seminal period for the artist, when he had just arrived in London and was recovering from a serious road accident – and reveals his interest in performance, which stemmed from what he called “the theater of the natural world” and is steeped in childhood memories of street performers in India.
“The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998” at the Barbican, London (October 5, 2024 – January 5, 2025)
“Balraj Khanna: Theater of the Natural World” at Tate Britain, London (June 24, 2024 – April 21, 2025)
More info
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, Regent’s Park.
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Main image: MF Husain, Autobiography Pechwaind Oil on canvas, 1.5 × 1.8 m. Courtesy: Aicon
