Gallery Espace24 presents உடல் | Udal: Reading the Body from the Avtar Collection, in collaboration with and at Alliance Française, Madras. The exhibition brings together a wide range of South Asian artistic engagement with the ‘body’ as a theme from the collection of the Avtar Foundation for the Arts, Chennai. Presenting the multifarious, many-layered, and charged presence of the body in art, the artworks on view engage with the body as form and non-form, in representational, stylised and abstracted modes across a wide diversity of genres and mediums. The exhibition seeks to examine the abiding draw of the body in art via its energising presence in every human endeavour, implicated in social structures and hierarchies, as articulated by the artists. Artists read the body variously as the desired object of beauty, subject to mortality and degeneration, alone and in company of others, in narrative and fantasy, the body as physical and psychic wound, as political; and abidingly, the body as identity and memory. In the engagements, the body emerges as elementally personal but possessing a universality in the connections it forges with the viewer.
Find out more about the show here.