Akar Prakar presents new works by Manish Pushkale.

Manish Pushkale, who has charted his trajectory as an artist in Delhi, was born and raised in Bhopal, where he trained as a geologist. In Bhopal, too, he found his painterly métier in the ethos of creativity nurtured at Bharat Bhavan by the artist and cultural activist J Swaminathan. What these words conceal are the interwoven histories that have nourished the artist’s sensibility, the multiple horizons of consciousness that inform his approach to abstraction.

In the series of paintings presented, he employs the running stitch associated the kantha tradition of embroidery as his generative motif, playing it out over surfaces animated by a palette of reds, ochres, and umbers. The painted stitch morphs into rivers, ravines, rising terraces in a survey map. The colours remind us vividly of the textile and embroidery arts of the nomadic communities that traverse what had once been the Dakshinapatha, the great trade route passing through his home city, connecting the northern Indian capitals of Varanasi and Vidisha with the peninsula, Pratishthana, Madurai and Kanchipuram.

To view the exhibition online, click here.