A VIRTUAL PHOTO EXHIBITION
CONFLUENCE - LALITHA LAJMI
19th AUGUST - 19th SEPTEMBER 2021
View the Exhibition here: https://tinyurl.com/CONFLUENCEGZH
This Exhibition is presented by Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad, Curatorial associate Lina Vincent in collaboration with Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai
What should one write of art that speaks volumes on its own?
How can one confine the many trajectories of an artist’s mind within few chosen themes and contexts?
This exhibition is a Confluence in more ways than one – it offers glimpses of Lalitha Lajmi’s extensive repertoire in painting, drawing, and printmaking, bringing together formal and conceptual explorations of the artist across several decades- right from the 60s until contemporary times. It also embodies in meaning, the manner in which her art practice has always been the meeting point of all her experiences and emotions; the very substance of her life.
Lajmi is a deeply intuitive artist who has embraced change at every turn, allowing her inner urge to lead her into newer ways of expression. She often explains from her own experience that it takes a long time to find oneself in one’s work. Considering herself a self-trained artist, she was advantageously perhaps, kept away from the rigidities of a conventional fine arts education.
One of the most appealing aspects of Lalitha Lajmi’s works are that they have the capacity to become a reflection of a viewers’ own experience. They are deeply human in content and communicate at an emotional level.
Looking through the compilation of work, one sees dimensions of a richly layered life; of challenges and compromises, of a woman’s inner and outer life, her vulnerabilities and resilience – there is also love, desire and longing; there are naked realities mingling with myth and fantasy. One also finds pauses, and moments of reckoning, with shifts in form and visual language. It is an ageless story of human endeavour, relationships and transgressions. Lajmi seamlessly juxtaposes birth and death, belonging and loss, turbulence and contentment. Her art is an empowered space where she tells her story, with all its ups and downs. The act of expression for her is fluid and cathartic.
Symbols and metaphors recur in her visual vocabulary – masks, performers, playing cards, games and toys, pots and receptacles; these take on a variety of meanings in relation to the context they are set in. Lajmi has derived artistic joy from the simplest depiction of tree, to more complex and multilayered narratives of human life. Often, these have been autobiographically inclined, combining personal experience with imagined contexts.
The exhibition loosely follows a chronology of artistic production through different stages of her life: from early woodcuts and etchings, her experimentation with organic abstraction, to extensive phases of figuration in oils and watercolours. The subdued and grainy tones of etchings and aquatints and the rawness of wood and linocut suited her sensibilities – as does the softness of water colour washes. The show culminates in her ‘Memory Roll’, the stellar creation of two paper scrolls inhabited by strings of motifs, birds, people; an evocative confluence of memory and experience that represents the power of Lajmi’s drawing even today.
We are fortunate to be let into this world of stories and feelings, as the artworks turn a prismatic lens on the artist’s journey, and her indomitable spirit - as a woman, as a mother.
Lina Vincent 2021
Curatorial Associate
About Lalitha Lajmi
Lalitha Lajmi, born in 1932, in Kolkata, is a prominent painter and printmaker. She is a self-taught artist raised in a family deeply involved in the arts. She started painting in the early sixties, when she participated in a group exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai.
At the same gallery she had her first solo exhibition in 1961.Over an illustrious career spanning 5 decades, she had several exhibitions at both national and international platforms. She has exhibited her work in India, (Germany) and US. Lajmi has given lectures in India and UK as well. She also showcased her work in Graphic workshop of Prof. Paul Lingerine in Mumbai and two of her etchings were selected for "India Festival" 1985, USA. Her work has been displayed in various famous art galleries including Prithvi Art Gallery, Pundole Art Gallery, Apparao Gallery, Chennai, Pundole Gallery, Mumbai, Hutheesing Centre for Visual Art, Ahmedabad, Art Heritage, New Delhi, Gallery Gay, Germany, Prints Exhibition at Max Muller Bhavan, Kolkata etc. .
Recent solo exhibitions include 'Memory Roll'2021 Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai, ‘The Minds Cupboards' 2013 at India Art Festival and Clark House Initiative; ‘The Masque of Life ‘2014 Jehangir Art Gallery and ‘Performers' 2015, Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai.
It was in the late 1970s that she started evolving a deeply individualistic style and began to make etchings, and to work with oils and watercolors. She is known for her use of auto-biographical elements, imaginative narratives of human relationships, and a tryst with psychoanalysis; in her vast repertoire, she has painted and published art works that sit on many panes of genre, technique and concept.
Lalitha Lajmi is the sister of Hindi film director, producer, and actor (late) Guru Dutt. Her work has also been influenced by Indian films such as those made by Dutt, Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor, besides having as a guiding force in the build-up of her career, K.H. Ara (who was a member of the Progressives). Her brother Devi Dutt was a producer and Atma Ram was also a director, she is the mother of Kalpana Lajmi who was a pioneer of parallel cinema in India as well as the cousin of Shyam Benegal the screenwriter and director of films now called Alternate or New Cinema.
Lajmi was the recipient of the Government of India Junior Fellowship from 1979 to 1983. She won the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) Travel Grant for International Contemporary Indian Women Artists Show for 50 Years of Indian Independence organized by Mills College of Art at Oakland, California in 1997 and Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) Travel Grant to East and West Germany for two Exhibitions in 1983.
Lajmi lives and works in Bombay.
