One can argue about whether we need a special show that only features women artists. But if anything justifies such a show, it is the show itself… the exhibits, the artists who have been featured and the response.

They’ve been around, these women who have been creating work that voices concerns that have buffetted women’s minds through time.

Like all artists and writers who need must express themselves, most of the work on display at the show titled ‘A Place in the Sun’. Women Artists of the 20th Century, spoke of the suppressed angst of being, well, suppressed. Either as women themselves, or of women they knew, watched, or learnt about.

Trailblazers in their own way, each of the artists had started work at a time when women were not encouraged to paint or sculpt. Their art as well as their identity as artists was, by and large, negated.

A few of course managed to find their ‘place in the sun,’ Amrita Sher Gill being the first name that comes to mind. This was not true only in India. Repressive attitudes forcing women writers to assume masculine non de plumes, artists who painted intensely, only to lean their finished work facing the wall, or stack them in the depths of some room.

The sun’s glare

A few of the 10 artists whose work was on show at the DAG gallery at the Taj Palace hotel in Mumbai were present. In their own way, each seemed somewhat out of her depth, as if the glare of being in the ‘sun’ was too much to bear.

Madhavi Parekh, Anupam Sud, Zarina Hashmi, Devyani Krishna, Navjot, Rekha Rodwittiya, Gogi Saroj Pal, Shobha Broota, Latika Katt and Mrinalini Mukherjee…names that are known to connoisseurs of art; women who have found enough recognition in art circles, but yet are often referred to as among the ‘second line of artists’. One wonders why.

Most of them play up the injustice of patriarchy, of women seen as sexual bodies or as child bearing receptacles. Marginalisation and class divides are other themes.

Themes that can cause one to squirm as the paintings look down on the breakfast table where just such a story might be playing out? Some of the paintings were disturbing, and vivid in the depiction of the injustices they spoke about, but that did not mean the artist was not of calibre.

Was it then, because the artists had used art as a means of release, of expression, and not for fame or instant recognition which is the Holy Grail today that most seek.

Coincidentally, the two DAG art galleries in the hotel premises were conceptualised and supervised by a woman. Komal Rampal, art curator and freelancer, used the hiatus of the lockdown to build up the two galleries, working ceaselessly to create the space that helped fill the void the lockdown had created.

When women work creatively, they expand ordinary concepts into the unusual, and what might have been an ordinary gallery turned out to be a warm salon-inspired space with wood worked ceilings and a staircase that leads to an alcove housing rare books on art that compliment the priceless exhibits below. But shows like this help of course, by turning the light on the artists, this being the third showing, after Delhi and New York. And that will move up their prices and move them out of ‘the second line’.

Events that celebrate women are laudatory, but also highlight the continuing divide. Whether it be art, or writing, management or entrepreneurship, women are perfectly as capable as their male counterparts.

They will find their place under the sun when no one has to turn the light towards them, to let the world know about their achievements.

The writer is a Consulting Editor with Penguin India

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