AN EYE FOR ART

Mumbai's Gallery Chemould - now Chemould Prescott Road - celebrates turning 60 with a string of seminal exhibitions

- Priya Pathiyan

The curved white wall imagined by artist Jitish Kallat at Chemould Prescott Road is akin to a black hole, where the fabric of space and time warps and takes you to another moment. It’s the mid-’80s, and an eager fourth-grader is led up the stairs near the iconic Café Samovar by her grandmother. They step into a wondrous world of colour and shape, a first for the child but a familiar ethos for the professional artist, a graduate from the Sir JJ School of Art. For the young grandmother, it’s a bittersweet symphony, as the work displayed is by artists that were her contemporaries at art school, but who have since moved on from realistic forms to more abstract expressions, while she refused to reinvent. She wants to introduce her granddaughter to the uplifting world of art, but not with her own disillusionment with its ephemeral nature.