The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking

Gallery Exhibition

The Printed Picture

Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking

Mumbai: Kala Ghoda, 26 August – 1 October 2016

New Delhi: Hauz Khas Village, 13 October – 3 November 2012

A print is an original work of art created and printed by hand by an artist or a professional printing assistant from a ‘matrix’—a plate, block of stone, wood or stencil. The image is created on the matrix and the artist takes a limited number of impressions or prints off it. These impressions are numbered and signed by the artist and belong to a limited edition, and this makes the print an original work of art and not a reproduction. Printmaking consists of a wide range of processes: relief printmaking which consists of techniques like engraving, woodcut and linocut; planographic processes such as lithography and oleography, intaglio processes such as drypoint, etching, aquatint, mezzotint, photo processes and collography; and serigraphy, where the image is printed through a silk screen on to the paper.

Printmaking arrived in India in the 16th century when visiting European Jesuits brought the first printing presses to Goa. It flourished as an industry under colonial British rule, and the growth of the vernacular printing industry spawned several indigenous schools of printmaking located in the bazaars of urban centres like Calcutta, Poona, Bombay, Mysore and Lahore.

Curated by artist and scholar Dr. Paula Sengupta, the exhibition charts printmaking’s eventful journey in India from its inception as a tool of the colonial enterprise to its rapid success in the printing industry in the 18th century, and the entry of the Indian bazaar print in the hands of the artisan as well as the art school-trained artist. It examines the changes in themes, techniques and aesthetic triggered by modernism, whose first seeds were sown in Santiniketan and Calcutta and seen in the works of stalwarts like Ramendranath Chakravorty, Gaganendranath Tagore and Haren Das, the subsequent expansion of printmaking to various regional art centres and institutions spread across the country, and the increasing presence of technology in printmaking. These centres, with their ongoing European influences, have produced at least two generations of gifted printmakers, and the exhibition records the contribution of such pioneering Indian artist-printmakers as Somnath Hore, Jyoti Bhatt, Krishna Reddy, Kanwal Krishna and Jagmohan Chopra, and also the work of the younger generation of talented printmakers represented by artists such as Anupam Sud and R. Palaniappan.

Artists

A. P. Bagchi

A. Ramachandran

Abanindranath Tagore

Ajit Dubey

Akhilesh Verma

Amitabh Banerjee

Anonymous Print

B. P. Banerjee

Basudev Roy

Bengal Lithograph

Bengal Oleographs

Bengal Woodcut

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Daniell William

Gulammohammed Sheikh

Indu Rakshit

Indumati Roop Krishna

K. V. Haridasan

Krishna Ahuja

Paneer Selvam

Portrait (Anonymous)

Pradip Maitra

Punjab Litho

Quamrul Hassan

Ramendranath Chakravorty

Ramkinkar Baij

Rani Dey

Ravi Varma Press

Ravi Varma Print

Rini Dhumal

Sanat Kar

Studio of Raja Ravi Varma

Sudhir Ranjan Khastgir

Sunil Das

Sunil Madhav Sen

Surendranath Ganguly

Sushanta Guha

Sushil Chandra Sen

Tapan Bhowmik

Tarak Basu

Thomas Daniell

V. Viswanadhan

Various Litho and Olio

Vijay Bagodi

Vinayak Masoji

Vivan Sundaram

Walter D’Souza

Yogesh Rawal

Zainul Abedin

‘Through the history of Indian modernism, printmaking has remained the stepchild of Indian art despite the fact that artists have been steadily drawn to work in the medium, some consistently and others intermittently’

– Paula Sengupta

exhibition highlights

press

View all press

The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking

Asia Society

September 2016

VIEW

400 years of Indian printmaking art on display

The Times of India

18 September 2018

VIEW

The Printed Picture