Mohan Samant
Aicon gallery is hosting a retrospective of the late Mohan Samant (1924 - 2004), in an exhibition titled Archaeologist at the Ancient City from August 15 - September 21, 2024.The art gallery in New York, United States, traces the early Indian modernist painter’s dynamic career from the 1960s through 2003, showcasing his richly textured surfaces from the 1960s and 70s, three-dimensional paper cut-outs from 1975, intricately hand-bent wire figures and cut niches of the 1980s, and, ultimately, the masterful fusion of these techniques in the 1990s and 2000s.
Born into a middle-class family in a suburb of Mumbai, India, Mohan (Manmohan) Balkrishna Samant was trained as an Indian classical musician and enrolled at the Sir J.J. School of Art from 1947. That year, several students founded the renowned Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), a collective that challenged the Bengal school's nationalism and advocated for an Indian avant-garde. Samant joined PAG in 1952, the year he earned his diploma, and participated in the group's final exhibition in 1953, alongside modern masters such as V. S. Gaitonde, M. F. Husain and Krishen Khanna.
The 1970s and 80s were crucial for Samant’s exploration of new mediums. By 1975, he began integrating paper cut-outs—he would paint and draw with watercolour and felt-tip markers on paper, then cut out the shapes to create three-dimensional scenes, which he glued to painted supports and mounted on canvas. The results resembled miniature theatre stages, reflecting his fascination with Andhra Pradesh’s leather-puppet theatre and Indonesia’s wayang (shadow puppets). Both the featured work of this art exhibition and Killing of the Mythical Bird (1980) exemplify Samant’s innovative cut-out technique.
