Art exhibitions are splendid with the most amazing and out-of-the-box ideas. However, even though they are an absolute heaven for the other artists and art lovers, there is little room for the visitors to touch and feel the art, or to experience and interact with the art form, as an artist would.
At the Piramal Art Museum, they have added a unique value to the regular exhibition style. In their latest exhibition, ‘Making Art: Materials and Technology’, they have kept it interactive, exploring the relationship between creativity and the materials used for making art possible.
The 7000 sq. ft. space is a disabled-friendly, public access Museum, pioneering a dynamic exhibitions programme that activates its rare collection of Indian contemporary and modern art. Established in November 2015, Piramal Museum of Art is a state-of-the-art museum with its primary space in Lower Parel. They also have three galleries in Byculla, Kurla and Mulund, along with Piramal Art Residency at Piramal Vaikunth in Thane. The Museum incorporates specially tailored education and community programmes that offer audiences insights and information into the curatorial perspectives with the goal of providing an inclusive and engaging environment to foster arts appreciation in the public.
Walking down the art gallery, one will come across magnificent and awe-inspiring artwork and a brief history of art, primarily using six materials. These include Charcoal, Ink and Graphite; Paints and Pigments; Sculpture; Printmaking; Photography; and Digital Media. This place offers a wide range of options to help one explore the artist within. The visitors can directly engage and experiment with these materials.
Piramal Museum of Art
Wall Painted by the visitors
As interactive as it sounds, the space is adorned with a huge wall painted by the visitors at the exhibition. Holding no boundaries, the wall is a unique amalgamation of creative ideas at their best, both from the young and naive, as well as the experienced lot. However, that is not where it ends. Art enthusiasts and the budding artists can visit the place anytime, create their masterpiece using the materials available at the exhibition and put them on display alongside other renowned artists.
Ashvin Rajagopalan, Director of Piramal Art Foundation, highlighted the importance of interactive exhibitions such as these and said,
“An interactive art exhibition plays a vital role in creating more art and artists. We believe that when someone enters the space and finds themselves immersed in the possibility of being able to make something or create a work of art, that could ignite a spark, and lead them into wanting to pursue a career in the arts.
The purpose of museums is to educate an audience. And hence, we believe that if we have a sustained audience, a community that we build over time, they will gain the knowledge and therefore, the skills required to appreciate art. This will definitely widen the possibilities of how people perceive art in the future.”
Taking a stroll at the art gallery, one would come across artwork from little kids and young artists, all doing a brilliant job with the skill of expressing unique ideas, using different styles and art types. Besides the work from the budding artists, paintings and sculptures from other celebrated artists such as Ravi Kumar Kashi, Nikhil Chopra, K.G. Subramanyam, and Jitish Kallat will leave anyone mesmerised.
Spread across three months, the initiative focuses on various workshops and activities to offer a hands-on experience for the art enthusiasts to engage with different forms of art, including charcoal art making and even edible art, to name a few.
Besides fine arts, the exhibition also displays how photography has evolved over years to the usage of DSLRs today. The exhibition displays a range of cameras from different eras, with a brief history of a Heliograph and a Camera Obscura. The exhibition is a walkable encyclopedia about art and its history.
Ravi Kumar Kashi's Search - Cast cottonrag pulp, stained with tea
To talk about other innovations, the exhibition also displays lithography, fibre glass and clay sculptures, digital art, lenticular prints, and many more. Enriching as it sounds, an art lover would leave the exhibition spellbound with all the creativity and knowledge.
Talking of the hard work which goes behind curating such a spectacle, Ashvin also mentioned,
“Our curatorial strategy revolves around our core collection, focusing on modern and contemporary Indian art. We don’t just showcase this collection, but also try to build upon the stories that the artwork and the collection is trying to tell. We have also tried to add to the larger picture and expand on the scope of our collection. All our exhibitions are contextualized by the collection.”
Nikhil Chopra's Charcoal on Paper
Looking at all the artwork from the visitors, one would be personally taken by awe and inspiration to pick up a paint brush and a canvas and start painting his masterpiece. For an art lover, time would come to a standstill while he experiences and interacts with different types of art at the Piramal Museum of Art. For someone who is lured by art to create something new and explore different perspectives using creativity, this place is a must visit.
Share
Tweet
