Articulation of the human figure has been pivotal to all artistic endeavors as seen from the early works of the Harappa & Mohen jodaro civilization and the naturalism in Greek art. In the Indian context, the sculptures of the Gandhara and Chola Periods are visual theologies of sacred images and their myriad manifestations seeking to deify through iconic forms all that is human and sacred.

Among the contemporary idioms of visual, multimedia, photography and installation art, as sculpture seeks to reassert its position ‘The Human Figure, a seminal show of Indian sculptors working and celebrating the human form, attempts to review the directions taken by mid-generation Indian contemporaries, whose widely broadened repertoire ranges from metaphoric to political and gender based concerns, seeking to represent in a more tangible way all our abstract experiences.

My grateful acknowledgements to Marta Jakimowicz for curating this significant show and for her detailed and insightful essay & to all participating artists who have submitted works specific to this show.

Tunty Chauhan

Curatorial Note

If the human figure preoccupies so many contemporary artists, it is because we receive even most abstract and idea-based experiences through our embodied souls. Hence, although some artists may confess the inability to adequately represent or evoke such a figure with the entirety of the emotions and thoughts it holds, they cannot resist the challenges it poses and the fulfilment it promises. We may be no longer entitled to perceive the world here and above through the ideal anthropomorphic medium, and yet we remain bound to our bodies and sensations they generate. Perhaps the recent developments in the country, where extraordinary growth and confidence co-exist with an immensity of deprivation and injustice, on their own ask for a response that gives importance to the human condition and questions of a fundamental character.

Marta Jakimowicz

Threshold Art Gallery