For a fair whose eye is so clearly on commerce, there was a merciful absence of the typical artists from big Western fairs. Instead, the focus was on artists from the surrounding region and South Asia. The fair’s artistic director, Pablo del Val, boasted that this edition of the fair ‘had the highest percentage of artists from the Global South’ in its history.

Three contemporary artists on what the term means to them. Alisha Wormsley, Mequitta Ahuja, and Cauleen Smith all help move the conversation beyond Black science fiction tropes. 

The international gallery is set to curate showcases by M. F. Husain, Rasheed Araeen, Victor Ekpuk, Sheetal Gattani, and more at the 14th edition of IAF.

STIR speaks to galleries on their special inclusion at the India Art Fair which will present 86 exhibitors and more than 1000 artists from February 9-12, 2023, in New Delhi.

A new exhibition of critical artworks by acclaimed international artist Rina Banerjee will open at the Syracuse University Art Museum on Thursday, Jan. 19.

We see from “Black-word” that Ahuja is pushing art-world boundaries. In different ways and in different works of hers, she alludes to or appropriates tropes and conventions that the history of Western art brought to the fore in different times, especially during the Renaissance and the period of modernism. 

Her second solo show with New York's Aicon Gallery, "Black-word," opens today.

The session was attended by students, art enthusiasts, artists and others

Anjolie Ela Menon embraces being called a maverick in her latest solo exhibition, 'Nostalgia'. 

In artist Rasheed Araeen’s aesthetics, there is hardly a conflict between modernity and faith

Rejecting the contradictions in the characterisation of his oeuvre by western institutions, Araeen considers the influence of Islamic thought in the development of modernism.

The department of Seine-Saint-Denis inaugurated, on November 1, the work "Le Vigilant" by the internationally renowned Algerian visual artist Rachid Koraïchi, installed in the Georges-Valbon park in La Courneuve.

“Le Vigilant," a monumental sculpture by Rachid Koraïchi, was inaugurated on November 1st 2022 in the park of the Courneuve, in Seine-Saint-Denis to pay tribute to those, French and Algerian, who sacrificed their lives for an independent Algeria.

Here are some amazing Highlights from the show

On occasion of his new publication Islam & Modernism (Grosvenor 2022) and a solo exhibition at New York’s Aicon Gallery (on through November 19), Araeen discusses the persistence of Eurocentrism in discourses of modernism.

“I have felt from the very start of my art education that the excitement by color was by itself for me, uplifting. There was something very direct and biological about it, which engulfed me in a way…. What I was trying to express was that the color has given me charge to use it as completely, like in music, as the sound becomes a vehicle for creating a universe.”

Two renowned Nigerian female artists, drawn from different generations, Peju Alatise and Nike Davies-Okundaye, are having their moments in the international limelight at the Frieze Art Fair in London, UK.

The 2022 exhibition is on view through November 13.

Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle sits down with the artist to discuss his background, his art and how he came to build this paradisaical cemetery for migrants.

Rina Banerjee’s imaginative, complex and layered world comes to life at the Hunterdon Art Museum as she explores ideas of gender, identity, beauty, and human psyche.

New York-based artist Max Colby uses found objects and materials to create artworks that are at once camp and a subversive mimicry of it to evoke revival, embrace, and opulence.

The impressive side by side solo exhibitions work together, not apart. A love of deep color isn't all the artists have in common at Aicon.

A short video detailing the making of Afternoon with Lorenzo featured in the exhibition I am My Ancestor's Essence.

Behold the titles used by Rina Banerjee. They read like poems.  

Le projet a été dévoilé ce week-end, alors que ce mardi marquera le 60e anniversaire de l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Rachid Koraïchi, l’artiste de renommée internationale a choisi de faire don de sa future sculpture à la Seine-Saint-Denis qui l’avait contacté pour un travail mémoriel.

Artist Rachid Koraïchi donates a work to the Department of Seine-Saint-Denis

Sculptor K.S. Radhakrishnan has put together a non-linear show of the artist’s iconic works at Emami Art Gallery, Kolkata 

STIR explores the possibilities and limitations of participatory art that is highly political in nature, and can the original context and idea of public space be retained?

Aicon is proud to announce Rachid Koraïchi’s Le Jardin d’Afrique in Zarzis, Tunisia, has been shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 2020-2022 cycle. The Jardin was a focal point of his solo exhibition at the gallery earlier this year: Le Chant de l’Ardent Désir.

Raza’s impact on the world of art was immense and immeasurable, says Kiran Nadar. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is currently exhibiting works that explore the acclaimed painter’s evolution as an artist

Rasheed Araeen’s new work on display at the COMO Museum can be connected to his earlier paintings in terms of abstraction.

Hunterdon Art Museum presents two new exhibitions opening Sunday, May 15, 2022. “Rina Banerjee: Blemish, In Deep Pink Everyplace Begins” and “Maxwell Mustardo: Dish-Oriented” will be on view through Sept. 4, 2022. 

Blemish, In Deep Pink Everyplace Begins, May 15 - September 4 at Hunterdon Museum

Video tour of Peju Alatise's exhibition 'Alafia; at kó, Lagos, Nigeria, April 4-30, 2022.

Rachid Koraïchi participated in the I Conference on Islamic Ornamentation organized by the José Val del Omar School of Art in Granada.

Maharjan sat down with the Post’s Shranup Tandukar to discuss his relationship with language, his satisfaction in laborious monotony, and his opinion on personal art.

Noted artist Rasheed Araeen’s public sculpture, unveiled at Bagh-i-Jinnah recently, has the ability to draw in viewers for close inspection

A steadily growing attendance at the Nike Art Centre’s last-Sunday-of-the-month Spotlight Art and Artists Review programme lets on to the fact that it is gradually catching on with the Lagos art community. Of course, this may also have something to do with the charisma of the latest featured duo, Peju Layiwola and Peju Alatise, who are among Nigeria’s leading female contemporary artists. 

A friend salutes Francis Newton Souza on his 20th death anniversary — and expresses remorse for having let him down

Koraïchi introduced a project he initiated in Tunisia in response to the Mediterranean migrant crisis by creating cemeteries for victims to be buried and remembered with dignity.

The first physical exhibition mounted by the Piramal Art Museum celebrates five decades of Raza's work, with some special paintings from its collection.

New York’s Aicon Art mounted a retrospective of Indian artist KS Kulkarni (1918–1994), foregrounding colorful semi-abstract canvases from his late career. Fusing modern and traditional approaches, Kulkarni was inspired by landscapes, religious motifs, and everyday life.

Top 12 booths to see at Art Dubai as it returns home to Madinat Jumeirah for 2022. Dubai's pre-eminent art fair is back to its original location with more than 100 participating galleries.

An exhibition now on view at Pulitzer Arts Foundation turns that instruction on its head. Visitors to “Assembly Required” are encouraged to pick up, fold, walk into or even wrap the artworks around themselves.

They have been knifed, disguised and abandoned, and now three towering tapestries successfully smuggled out of Afghanistan as the Taliban took over are on display in New Plymouth.

One of the big events on the calendar is undoubtedly Art Dubai, with the 15th event taking place from Friday, March 11 to Sunday, March 13 at Madinat Jumeirah. This year, the art fair is gearing up for its biggest programme thus far with more than 100 contemporary and modern galleries participating.

Inimitable Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi's latest exhibition Le Chant de l’Ardent Désir is a transcendental and hypnotic experience that compels the viewer into examining our shared experiences of loss, longing, human suffering and dignity.

These women artists have consistently commanded critical acclaim for their work across the world with the diversity of their art practices and continue to be some of the most sought-after artists by seasoned collectors of Indian Art.

The world has woken up to the new transactional idiom of NFTs and India’s stellar artist Paresh Maity’s NFT debut with Artexposure as the owner , is a classic case of ownership with the physical asset as well as the digital in his historic pandemic creation The Perpetual Glare.

February 22 marked the centenary of one of India's most famous modernist painters, SH Raza. Six people -- a collector, a gallerist, artists, a teacher and a curator -- recount their favourite thing about the iconic master's art and life

David Miliband praised the "remarkable project carried out in Zarzis, which is an inspiration to us all. All over the world there is every reason to think that nothing can change, but through your art and your determination to remind us of our common humanity, you show that special things happen when people take responsibility."

In inventing a unique artistic language, Koraïchi draws upon many languages and cultures, including those of the Berber and Tuareg peoples. Within his fold, too, are invented Chinese ideograms plus magical squares and talismanic glyphs and other auspicious signs. 

On Friday February 25, 2022 from 6:30 p.m., the Algerian Cultural Center, located in Paris, is organizing an evening devoted to the work of Rachid Koraïchi, in the presence of the artist. 

Britain’s empty high street shops and derelict department stores should be transformed into artists’ studios and galleries to bring life back to city centres, according to the outgoing director of one of the country’s leading art spaces.

Every month, hundreds of galleries add newly available works by thousands of artists to the Artnet Gallery Network—and every week, we shine a spotlight on one artist you should know. This week, Artnet spotlights Rachid Koraïchi at Aicon Gallery.

The Phillips Collection is marking its 100th anniversary with a new graphic installation by D.C. based artist Victor Ekpuk. FOX 5's Gwen Tolbart spoke to the artist about his work, which was inspired by ancient Nigerian script.

The traffic island garden, which sees heavy traffic going to North and South Mumbai, now hosts a 10-foot-high installation of two hands, each holding a glass of ‘cutting chai’

Everything in the three-story house was done up after careful consideration of each others’ wishes. The result: special places reserved for the couple's own art, separate work areas, and more.

This year marks the 50th death anniversary of Jamini Roy, often hailed as the father of modern Indian art. But he has had his fair share of detractors too.

Banerjee rejects the notion that people choose to be artists. Rather, she says, “Let’s say that art is a reflex for artists and art seekers, and its boundless quality makes me work very hard and love it very much. I could also say that people never fail us; it’s our fixation on being fixed, rigid, standing in one place, that fails people, and this is where migration and ethnicity studies, postcolonialism and culture studies, queer studies keep us awake and moving as we are meant to.”

Working towards a better version of yourself in 2022? We bring you inspiration from some very inspiring Hyderabadis. Master draughtsman, painter, printmaker and one of the most celebrated names in contemporary Indian art, Laxma Goud tells us what sets him apart from the rest.

New Canvases — that’s the simple title, shorn of thematic references. But the new canvases of Sheetal Gattani, presented by Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, at its recent show — both in the gallery and online — overturned the very idea of ‘new’ being virgin, untarnished territory.

Ekpuk’s scribbling from the mid-1990s similarly oscillates between transparency and secrecy. Some signs may be familiar to those with a basic knowledge of nsibidi, other African ideographic systems, Nigerian current affairs, and global popular culture, while others come tantalizingly close but ultimately refuse to reveal themselves and supply any specific meaning to the narrative. 

Artists have created a hybrid Indo-European style of paintings, thus advancing the cultural hegemony of western artistic expression
While the history of Indian art stretches back to the ancient era, the 19th century witnessed an early progression of Indian art being adapted to the western visual lexis with the emergence of Company Style painting.

As compared to the previous year, 2021 allowed art to stage a comeback with shows and exhibitions.

Born in Lahore and based in New York, the painter Salman Toor depicts the lives of queer, South Asian men in imagined surroundings that draw as much from the Old Masters as they do from the modern metropolis. Toor’s scenes are often casual – his figures dance at house parties and stare into smartphones – but always meticulously composed.

For millennia now, the Ganges has been revered and disregarded in equal measure, much like women themselves [...] This and more have been a source of insatiable inspiration and curiosity for artist Jayasri Burman since her childhood, which has now culminated into a show of enormous scale called River of Faith.

The lobby [of the Kimpton Banneker in Washington DC] also features an abstract mural by Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk in addition to work from Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter, a co-founding member of Black Artists of DC.

Kavi Gupta showed A mended heart, a lightened soul and A murmer of a prayer, both 2021 by Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai who has used every day wearable objects tied to her cultural heritage – cut, woven, and tied vintage saris with mounts of ghungroo bells – to create new landscapes, or maps.

One such site is Zarzis in southeastern Tunisia, where last June Rachid Koraichi, an Algerian artist, decided to build a cemetery, scented by jasmine blossoms and flowering orange trees, that he calls the Jardin d’Afrique, or Garden of Africa. 

As the UAE celebrates its Golden Jubilee, Kazem reflects on how rapidly the art scene has evolved – from once-in-a-year shows in the 1980s to an amalgamation of galleries, institutions, collectives and increasingly global events today.

Olivia Walton, who recently took over as chairperson of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art from billionaire founder Alice Walton, bought a work by Suchitra Mattai made of saris from the artist’s mother and grandmother, priced around $30,000.

At the Aicon Gallery in New York, Bernando Siciliano’s works of art, explicitly inspired by Philip Roth, immortalise the moments that narrate these two pandemic years.

Artist and Painter Paresh Maity spoke exclusively to India Today about his latest exhibition in Kolkata. Paresh Maity is exhibiting his art in Kolkata after a gap of six years. Watch the full interview.

The first piece in the hall is Mequitta Ahuja’s 2020 oil painting entitled “Portrait of Her Mother,” a gentle rendition of the artist’s studio with Ahuja standing in the foreground, her body turned slightly away as though she is torn between us and her work. 

Seeing how the idol makers brought the Goddess Durga to life, a seven-year-old child from a remote village in Midnapore’s Tamluk area tried his tender hands in clay molding and even managed to sell a few pieces at the local fairs for as little as 10-15 paise in the early 70s. Who would have thought back then that some 48 odd years later that very child’s artwork would sell at a premium all over the country and beyond? That’s Paresh Maity for you.

Ekpuk, a Nigerian American artist, painted a mural for a new gallery, Arts of Global Africa, in March 2017. His art is inspired by nsibidi, a sacred means of communication among male secret societies in southeastern Nigeria. Evolving out of the graphic and writing systems of nsibidi, Ekpuk’s art embraces a wider spectrum of meaning to communicate universal themes.

The exhibition juxtaposes precious old manuscripts, grouped together in three display cases, and works by contemporary artists and writers, most of which are from the Cabinet d’Art Graphique at the Centre Pompidou, in which writing is combined with imagery, sometimes even disappearing completely. This journey through inscriptions bears witness to a primordial interweaving of writing and drawing and reveals a universal vital energy. This energy circulates through gestures and lines, fragile crucibles of history, human beliefs and emotions.

‘Picturing Motherhood Now’ emerged during the global pandemic and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the important conversations about race that followed,” Liebert says. “I think these world events did inflect the show. They inevitably shaped the way artists were thinking, and the issues that were on the minds of our catalog contributors.

There is a long history of picturing motherhood. That history illuminates the culture from which it springs. What, then, do contemporary pictures of motherhood say about our own time? 

For Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi, art has the power to enact change, and his paradisical cemetery for migrants who drowned while crossing the Mediterranean is a shining beacon of hope.

We recently sat down with Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise at her new Glasgow studio to find out more about her back-to-back Venice Biennales, how she juxtaposes being a contemporary architect and fine artist, and how Yoruba culture has helped her work stand out in today’s global art world.

2021-22 Sherman Fairchild Fellow Shiloah Coley speaks with Victor Ekpuk about the sociopolitical signs and symbols in his centennial commission.

Pooja Iranna coaxes industrial materials and office accessories, including cement, mirrors, and staples, into thought-provoking portrayals of how the world and its proliferating cities are evolving. 

Victor Ekpuk is internationally renowned for his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which reimagine the ancient Nigerian communication system, Nsibidi, to create his own unique language of abstraction.

What Now My Friend?, curated by Salima Hashmi at Aicon Gallery, New York (December 17–January 23) denotes the perpetual saga of strife between the oppressors and the oppressed. 

“Ma”, the artist’s new exhibition at New York’s Aicon Gallery, includes 20 oil sketches and five large oil paintings. The works may be the artist’s most intimately personal yet—made over the past 15 months, during the final period of her mother Sonja’s life, the works are a form of grieving. Loss, healing, gratitude, and connection exist as interconnected and equal energies.

Xpect is a self-portrait. The model is Ahuja. Her classic pose is made decidedly contemporary by her pregnant belly, the sonogram she is holding, and her slight smile. It’s a birth announcement! An Instagram trope inside a painting that is loaded with rebuttals to art history.

The difficulty of having a show during this time is that the atrocities in the world today make it difficult to have any kind of celebration while so many around the world find themselves in mourning, but I suppose that revelation is a continuous need. I wish that people could come and enjoy it with me but I understand that that's not possible at the moment.

If museums are serious about globalizing their collections, it won't do just to pick out a few Africans or Asians or Latin Americans whose art superficially resembles what the West already approbates. Art history has to be preconceived as a perpetual migration of artists, images and ideas - across oceans, across decades. A sterling case study awaits in the upstairs space of Aicon Gallery, displaying the lean, precise, calligraphic abstractions of Ernest Mancoba (1904 - 2002), a South African painter who spent his career in Denmark and France.

Aicon Art New York brought us through Natvar Bhavsar: Beginnings (March 1-April 6, 2019) an astonishing show on this Indian-American artist’s early color-field paintings. Now, by giving us Natvar Bhavsar: Sublime Light from September 26-October 31, 2020, the gallery is spotlighting his paintings from the late 1970s through the 1980s. 

A contemporary American painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Weston, Connecticut, Mequitta Ahuja casts herself as mythic warriors, epic heroes, and power figures descending from traditions across cultures. She synthesizes her multicultural heritage into works that evoke the process of identity construction.

The lockdown must serve as the time to understand and introspect the result of our actions.

Artist-couple Pooja and GR Iranna on finding artistic interpretation in a pandemic

In her latest solo, Silently, at the Centre for Contemporary Art in New Delhi, artist Pooja Iranna talks about encroachment and urban overgrowth, urging for ecological redressal.

Illustration, one of the basic pedestals on which strong creative skill in art is mounted, exists in the trajectory of U.S.-based Victor Ekpuk.

Over the years, he has shown a mastery of illustration both for newspapers and books, creating minimal contents for mainstream art exhibitions. However, in the last few years, Ekpuk has installed large public space art and shows across three continents. More interesting is the artist’s sculptural executions.

US-based Nigerian artist, Victor Ekpuk has made public the acquisition of his paintwork Union of Saint and Venus by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, (NMAAHC).