CURRENT

At the core of the exhibition proposed to celebrate the Tao Art Gallery’s 25th anniversary is the hospitable ethos it has created and sustained: an ethos that has been open and responsive to artistic creativity across the conventional boundaries of style, genre, medium and generation. Tao has acted as a platform to present the work both of established figures as well as emergent practices in the art world – which is why this celebratory exhibition is titled Gateways and Pathways.

The Tao Art Gallery has provided its viewers with gateways into the canonical history of the art world as well as with pathways forward into evolving futures. And these gateways and pathways have not been mutually exclusive: in the ambit of Tao, established figures have recreated themselves startlingly in experimental mode, while emergent practices have been in vibrant dialogue with their inheritance. Since the journeys of more than sixty artists will comprise this exhibition, it will act as a festival of varied artistic itineraries, an assembly of diverse voices. Among these artists are those who have been closely associated with the gallery, as well as those who have been friends of the gallery and shown there occasionally, either in solo presentations or group shows.

All we ask of the participating artists is that they should be intensely themselves. And as the works come in, we will compose them across the exhibition space – the historic Jehangir Art Gallery, designed by the architect Durga Shankar Bajpai and celebrating the 73rd year of its opening this year – in terms of remarkable affinities and dramatic paradoxes.

Integral to the narrative of this exhibition, also, is the trajectory of the gallery as it has mapped the period between the late 1990s and the present – a phase in India’s art history that has borne witness to a shift from the dominance of a few major painters and sculptors to the diffusion of a wide range of practitioners, many of whom straddle the domains of art, popular culture, activism, and various subcultures, while also exploring the formal and conceptual possibilities of multiple media. In charting this trajectory,Gateways and Pathwayswill also propose a flow of shifting timelines, marked by the interplay of legacy and improvisation.