Headline, June10, 2013

'''THESE BRISTLING AND -SIZZLING-

 YOUNG ARTISTS OF INDIA'''

Indian contemporary art has been really hot for while but now it's just sizzling. ''We're on fire at the moment. But we've worked towards this for more than 10 years.'' said Bharti Kher.

A growing buzz among the world collectors for work from the subcontinent heralds A Golden Age For Young Indian Artists.

Kher and husband Subodh Gupta are two of India's most celebrated young artists and appear in UK shows regularly alongside contemporaries such as Ravinder Reddy, Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Hema Upadhyay and Tallur I.N. and Shezad Dawood.

Some years back, Charles Saatchi's blockbuster at the Duke of York's HQ, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, exhibited many delightful days. while Manchester Art Gallery presented : Facing East.

''Our post-colonial relationship with India has meant that we have shown their art for decades, but as something exoticised, romanticised,'' said David Thorp, Curator of the Frank Cohen Collection. ''This generation of artists can hold its own at an International level. The power has shifted.''

One reason is a strong and affluent community of Indian Collectors that has championed homegrown art for for the past 20 years rather than rely on Western buyers. Another is, because of its colonial past, many Indian artists have grown up in the UK, or attended British art schools, imbuing them with a concept of Internationalism that feeds the Indian art scene.

But most importantly, it's down to the philosophy and spirituality of India itself. ''Conceptual art is part of our culture, there's installation everywhere,'' says Kher. ''People understand the abstract  -they believe in the idea of an object, that it says something else.''

Exploration of the hierarchical structures of class, religion and gender is intrinsic to most Indian art and the effect of showing this work in glamarous Western locations can be dramatic. Art impresario Enrico Navarra made indian art theme of his 2006 Art On the Beach and the St Tropez coast was studded with magnificently incongruous piece such as Jitish Kallat's four-and-a-half meter-high sculpture,''Eruda'', based on the illiterate street children who sell pulp fiction to commuters at traffic lights.

Covered in black lead, the sculpture stained the fingers of the yacht-owning public, making a collision of the privileged with the impoverished. Meanwhile Ravinder Reddy's beautiful, gaudy female heads punctuate every international art fair, as ubiquitous as the Hirsts and Warhols. Fusing Hindu Sculpture tradition with a pop art irreverence, they speak of Indian women's merging of respect for tradition with an embrace of contemporary art.

In The Empire Strikes Back,   -each piece consists of a black plinth with a perspex case on top, housing tumbleweed, out of which flows Arabic neon script. ''Each bit of writing is a unique name of God, they are wonderful attributes: compassion, kindness, sound judgement etc. It is a way of contemplating the Divine on a windswept plain: fullness and emptiness are both contained in anything philosophical.''

Yes, India at its very best!

With respectful dedication to All The Students and Professors of India. See ya all on !WOW!

The World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''The Edge Of Love.''

''ABSOLUTE POWER?...... ABSOLUTELY''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless