DESIGN-KUNIKA-CHANAKYA-AUROBINDO-STUDIO ONE: 1960 - 90.
I wanted my life to work... with the beautiful people, the creative people, the knowledgable people, the crazy people. So I joined the DESIGN in 1960. It was the best printed and published magazine in India, devoted to art and architecture publisthed from Bombay.
Six years of apprenticeship with Patwant Singh, the never-say die boss of DESIGN, opened new frontiers of the creative world... that of the dancers, the musicians, the poets and the theatre groups.
In Delhi, Kunika Chemould Art Centre exposed me to the mass media. Regular coverage of art activities in the Express Group of newspapers and radio,kept me in high spirits. The dynamic wit of Som Benegal and the dedicated involvement of Kekoo Gandhi gave me the strength to embark on my own.
Came GALLERY CHANAKYA in 1969, the turning point of my life. Painters, sculptors and graphic artistis of fame and promise from Bombay,Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Baroda, coaxed me, pushed me and helped me to project their works.
Husain gave me the stamina, Swaminathan the insight, Gujral the vision and Santosh the spriritual strength. Ram and Gaitonde brought in silence.
During 1968-84 Gallery Chanakya presented over 95 one man and group shows of contemporary art along with the tattoo designs from Bastar and the ir-resistible drawings by Abu Abraham. Several lecture tours to Europe, United States of America & Canada under the government cultural exchange programmes gave me new vision to the art world, which was both familiar and new.
Under the banner of STUDIO ONE, ably run by my friend Prima Kurien, I dedicate my first one man show of drawings and watercolours to: The sensitive people, the creative people, The knowledgable people, the crazy people.
HAPPY DIWALI, to all of you, dear friends.
Shami Mendiratta October 15, 1990
From the catalogue of Shami Mendiratta " ART IS LIFE: LIFE IS ART". (Kala hi Jeevan Hai: Jeevan hi Kala Hai) 1990, INDIA.
SHAMI MENDIRATTA The Process of Churning in Creativity by Suneet Chopra
Art has been a way of life for Shami Mendiratta for over four decades and few know every nuance of it as he does. Starting on the Design magazine, he did his apprenticeship under Patwant Singh, that grand old man of Delhi. Then with Chemoulds at their Kunika Gallery. Here he met, his second boss, Kekoo Gandhi, and finally, started his own art gallery, Chanakya, in 1969- As a gallery person he came into close contact with a number of artists, especially G.R. Santosh, Shanti Dave, J. Swaminathan and M.F. Hussain, whose work he exhibited ande whose trials and tribulations he shared. But more than that, he managed many "firsts".He was the first to exhibit the now well-known Madhurbani artists from Bihar in Delhi. He was the first gallery owner to represent India at Venice. And there is a string of names among well-known artists whose work he exhibited for the first time in his gallery. All this inspired him eventually to paint himself. Then he became the first gallery-owner to close shop and become an artist. It all began with experimental doodles and water colours, encoruraged by his wife, Prima, then he did a 52 foot long scroll, and finally, large canvases in oils and acrylics, tele-filmes, and now, mixed media works on slate sheets form the Dahauladhar range, old wooden doors and windows,and murals. Experiment more than expreience guided this journey. It is natuaral, therefore, that one finds an echo in his works of other experimental artists, like Paul Klee, Wasssily Kandinsky or Joan Miro. But only an echo. For there are other points of reference that place his work squarely in our own art environment and nowhere else, reminding us that art and concrete experience share the same common material basis. Even mataphysical experiences have their material roots. In one of his Ether series, one can see a form that is so common in our hills and mountains, that of a temple on a mountain-top, with either a shining shikhara, or a pennant fluttering from it- but his particular arrangement reminds one not so much of that, as of J. Swaminathan´s Bird and Mountain series. One suddenly realises that the cut-out of a bird on top of a mountain has a far deeper significance in our visual aesthetics than one thinks. And only and artist who shares something in common with another can remind one of his work or reveal its inner secrets in this way. Other works in the same series put together material elements in a free combination with symbols trapped into daily use by religion, like the Ek Inkar scrawled on a door; or by the slate, like coins stuck on the surface of some of these works, or the postage stamp in his Gandhi series. Sometimes the comment is even sharply political, as in one such drawing where a dotted line directs the eye from a Gandhi stamp towards an Indira Gandhi like figure wearing a tiara, reminding one of how Gandhi also serves to give legitimacy to a number of persons and trends that have nothing to do with him intrinsically. His name has become something to conjure with. And the artist informs us he knows about it too. I am certain this was not the artist´s intention, for his work emerges out of the interplay of matter and movement. And movements then build a chain of forms that may or may not tell a story. The story may have elements of metaphysics in it, of day-to-day transactions, of deep underlying emotions as in his Creation series. But whatever the reference, his art gives form to it in a process we describe in our origin myths as manthan. It is a process beyond good and evil, giving birth to both poison and amrit, the potion of inmortality, reminding one that all these divisions are temporary and of our own making, while the process goes beyond them. Art not only comprehends this but leaves behind material evidence of its truth. To know that is enough.
(From the catalogues of Shami Mendiratta´s exhibition at ART HERITAGE, New Delhi, 1996)
