Giving a canvas to young artists

For the last two months, Rm Palaniappan has been busy coordinating with 60 young artists to get their art work down to Chennai. For the regional secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi, it was a huge responsibility as his centre was organizing the Regional Art Exhibition after a gap of 10 years. "In December, we got an order from the centre in Delhi directing us to revive the regional art exhibition, which used to be an annual event in the early 1980s," says Palaniappan."It was discontinued because it was losing out to the much larger National Exhibition of Art which is organised every year."
The exhibition, which was inaugurated on Friday, features the works of upcoming artists from the four south Indian states, Puducherry, Maharashtra and Goa. Palaniappan and his team contacted a senior artist in each of these states asking them to recommend artists aged below 40. "Getting in touch with artists such as P Gopinath, S G Vasudev, Sirpi Jayaraman and Sudhakar Chavan was the easiest way to identify young talent," he says. "Since many of the senior artists are professors at institutes, they were able to suggest new names." It took a lot of emails and phone calls to collect bio-datas and put together the catalogue, but it seems to have been well worth the effort. "The regional exhibition is a good way to gauge the art scenario based on the works of upcoming artists and document the current trends," says Palaniappan. For example, based on the entries that they have received, art works from Karnataka tend to be more figurative with human or animal representations.
"In Tamil Nadu, one can see more abstraction and the art work is more concept based," he says. For artists like Chennai-based artist K R Aneesh, the Akademi's initiative has opened up new venues. "There is very little gallery space in the city where new artists can display their work," says Aneesh, whose His work titled, 'Adaptation According to the Situation' is on display at the gallery.
"It also gives us an opportunity to see the works of our contemporaries."