Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002) was an Indian modernist painter renowned for his art writing and founding membership of the Bombay Progressive Artist Group in 1947. Aicon Gallery’s current show, Francis Newton Souza: A Celebration of the Centenary, honors his seven-decade-long career.

Frieze London showcases a wide range of artworks by Indian artists

Below, we present our 15 best booths from Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024.

The Indian modernist's retrospective at Aicon NY charts his practice from the early 1960s - 2003, unveiling his heavily textured surfaces, three-dimensional paper cut-outs, and more. 

In the year of centenaries, KNMA in Delhi brings the works of Mohan Samant, the unsung master of Progressive Artists' Gropu, back into spotlight with a seminal exhibition, 'Magic in the Square.'

 

Paresh Maity, one of India's most prolific painters, talks about his early and recent inspirations to paint.

The growing interest in Indian art underscores the need for continued investment and collaboration to keep inspiring each other, driving one another forward

Opening in Cambridge, UK, October 18, 2024.

From 4th-century Hindu sculpture to modernist photography, discover the South Asian artists who revolutionized creative culture at home and abroad.

One of the more unusual collateral exhibitions at this year’s Venice Biennale, The Rooted Nomad: M.F. Husain, might be a test case for what immersive art can and can’t do.

Rasheed Araeen's water ballet comes to east London's outdoor sculpture trail, The Line.

Written by Janeita Singh, titled F. N. Souza: The Archetypal Artist, the book celebrates the artist’s centenary through an incisive analysis of his life and work.

The lehenga, an exquisite creation, is brought to life by Jayasri Burman's painting, featuring 12 panels hand-painted on special Italian canvas.

From Nandalal Bose’s Dandi March print to Tagore’s linocut experiments, a Delhi exhibition traces the unique approaches of 13 artists, the evolution of printmaking from a mass-reproduction medium to a fine-art form, and how it influenced the 20th-century art world

Artist Surendran Nair uses art as an instrument to express his politics while firmly adhering to humanism.

Artists like MF Husain, Paresh Maity, and Sonal Ambani among others have found place in the landmark 60th edition of the art festival.

A new group exhibition coming to Liverpool Cathedral this spring will offer visitors a ‘realm of sensory exploration’.

Modern Art and Decolonisation: Paris 1908-1988

The cemetery near the Tunisian town of Zarzis, designed by artist Rachid Koraïchi, offers a respectful final resting place for migrants lost on their journey to Europe.

This week in Newly Reviewed, Jillian Steinhauer covers Maria Prymachenko’s allegorical paintings, Khadim Ali’s imagined creatures and Jody Wood’s “Social Pharmacy.”

Artists like Farah Atassi, Tahnee Lonsdale, Mequitta Ahuja, Akea Brionne, and Danielle Orchard fracture and distort the body, evoking the dissonance between exterior and interior worlds and the dynamic nature of identity.

Though at times a puzzling read, artist Rasheed Araeen’s latest book critiques Western scholarship that ignores Islam’s influence on modern art.

This month: Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Cynthia Lahti, the Met Museum’s rehung galleries, and more.

On view at Aicon, New York, the show features a range of dynamic new paintings and sculptures.

Ekpuk’s presence in the United Arab Emirates marks a transformative historical, cultural and artistic moment. Well received by audiences, he firmly inserts African art into the region. He invites us to (re)examine simplistic definitions of calligraphy, the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and script, the distinctions between writing, graphic writing and art – and to eagerly await his next creations.

Décrire Kelly Sinnapah Mary comme une "artiste engagée" serait un pléonasme. Dans sa façon d'appréhender le monde, "l'artiste est un être politique" par définition. Cette artiste guadeloupéenne au rayonnement international nous ouvre les portes de son univers. Inspirée par l'auteur Maryse Condé, elle nous délivre des clés de lecture pour mieux aborder ses œuvres, donne des pistes aux artistes désireux d'exposer hors de l'archipel et plus encore.

The 'Golden Deer' by Kashmiri artist Veer Munshi was also installed at Palladium Mall.

“At the Circle’s Center” offers a glimpse into the artist’s diverse practice, comprising small works on paper, large-scale paintings, embroidered and pinned textiles, mixed media photo-based works and video. The show takes its title from a recent diptych of Gouaches on paper, richly painted in green, red and blue, using her signature geometric patterns and circles.

Speaking to Artsy, Ekpuk suggested that the growing interest in his work from the region could be due to the “nature of the abstraction of my work that has to do with writing and touches on calligraphy,” adding that he believes the work “resonates with the aesthetics of the Middle East.”

The Oxford-based artist reflects on Convocation, now on view in London at The OWO.

Artist Viktor Ekpuk discovered that the symbols of the Nsibidi script could function as a form of abstraction — a way to reduce ideas to their essence.

These five fantastic artists speak about an artwork that celebrates the ideals of womanhood and explores the multiple avatars that a positioned stance of female empowerment embraces. 

 The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) has announced four new, visually inspiring exhibitions opening this September and November including, Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale.

[Ekpuk] may be the rare fine artist with the spirit of an incendiary cartoonist, but he doesn’t resort to strip comic tricks. His drawings, sculptures and acrylic paintings contain language, and ideas, too volatile to be contained by an oval.

Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage is on view at Art@Bainbridge, a gallery project of the Museum located in downtown Princeton. Four available rooms show seventeen selections from a thirty-year career. 

You don’t often get the chance to visit a museum and touch, move, shift or stack anything, making a date with the cubes, exploring ideas of symmetry, shape, and geometry, a fairly unique opportunity.

Rebel artist, now 88, had to wait till his mid-70s for international recognition

From Saturday 12 August, Zero to Infinity will be joined by Shamiyaana IV (Food for Thought: Thought for Change), an installation by Araeen outside Tate Modern comprising four colourful gazebos with tables and chairs.

His upcoming exhibit, Language and Lineage at Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey explores various themes that have unfolded in Ekpuk’s work over the last three decades.

This summer, you have the chance to participate in an ever-changing artwork as Rasheed Araeen’s interactive Zero to Infinity is brought to life. Staged in the gallery’s iconic Turbine Hall as part of UNIQLO Tate Play – Tate Modern’s free programme of playful art-inspired activities for families in partnership with UNIQLO – the work features 400 brightly coloured geometric cubes which people of all ages are encouraged to stack, tilt and balance to create new configurations. 

Take part in the performance of Rasheed Araeen’s endlessly changing sculpture. July 22 - August 27, 2023.

Opening Saturday July 22, 2023 at the Princeton University Art Museum's Art@Bainbridge.

Archival art serves to situate artists whose pasts have been belittled, denied or erased.

In her new paintings, Faiza Butt employs a new visual language.

The artist recently opened her retrospective, I Am And I Am Not – at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, and peels back the layers of the motivations and concerns shared between herself, curator Masuma Halai Khwaja, and gallery director Zara Stanhope.

In a belated effort to help rectify that, S.H. Raza’s paintings have been united in a rare, though restrained gathering of some 90 paintings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, on view until May 15. The exhibition is a first retrospective for the artist in France, where he lived from 1950 until 2011, and highlights his earlier, lesser-known experimental works.

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. 

“I Am And I Am Not” was showcased at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Frere Hall, and Gandhara Art-Space, from 28 November 2021, till 21 January 2022. Curated by Masuma Halai Khawaja, the retrospective was organized and hosted by Chawkandi Art Gallery and sponsored by HBL.

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.

In her current retrospective viewers can see the beginning of an oeuvre that scrutinizes personal, social, and cultural issues such as prescribed societal norms associated with the female gender.

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).

Conceived by world-renowned artist, Victor Ekpuk, the new landmark sculpture in the heart of the Diplomatic Area pays tribute to the Kingdom and reflects the changing face of a 40-year-old institution.

Victor Ekpuk's room-sized installation, "Shrine to Wisdom," invites visitors to sit and learn, while immersed in one of his signature murals, which is based on an ancient writing system

"There’s something about the sonorousness of the language and the richness of his color fields that connects somehow. Overall, Bhavsar’s works bring out color’s metaphysical aspects and, via his use of raw pigment, its profound physicality."

Mr. Koraïchi uses Arabic semiotics and calligraphy as the basis of his work, and the booth will feature engravings, banners, tapestries and a sculpture.

"Bhavsar is at once a thoroughly American painter and product of Indian culture, the deeper meanings and values of which have not left him.  Never, as he approaches the divine, does he lose touch with the richly cross-cultural experience that has formed him. A Bhavsar painting is immediately recognizable as his."

The works of Youdhi Maharjan and Monika Bravo are as different as the artists’ personalities yet exemplify these ideas, and the two share strong connections in their approaches to creativity and the meaning of art.

Aicon Art Gallery will exhibit the debut solo exhibition of the early work of octogenarian New York Indian American artist Natvar Bhavsar, ‘Beginnings.’

In his latest paintings, Salman Toor meditates on his life as a gay artist who divides his time between two diametrically opposite communities: New York, where he can live and love openly, and his hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, where the dictates of family and religion demand that he suppress his identity.

New York-based artist Salman Toor’s brushstrokes place young queer brown men in scenes of love, friendship, and solitude in his luscious oil paintings. In Time After Time, his ongoing exhibition at Aicon Gallery in Manhattan, he challenges the systematic exclusion of queer men of color from art history. Here, his figures claim the foreground with their bodies, donning flamboyant attires over their delicate physiques. The artist’s dandy types nonchalantly sip cocktails, zealously sway to music, or lazily lounge in their downtown apartments. Beauty, vulnerability, and power shines through each painting.

The quirkily titled Pale Sentinels: A Metaphor for Dialogue opened on 28 June at Aicon, its bold theme addressing Partition with critically acclaimed, award-winning Indian and Pakistani artists. 'Each artist in this group has, in one way or another, engaged with borders and constraints,' says Hashmi

Mr Khan is very determined not to box his work into any one particular category. His inspiration comes from his mindfulness of the details of everything around him.

From the quiet, impressionable surface of the moon to bustling London landmarks, Saad Qureshi’s sculpture, drawing, and installation art explores mental and physical landscapes. The artist’s work poetically probes cultural belonging, interconnectedness, and separation through scale, material, and metaphor.

The comedic play, The Birds, by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, revolves around the quest of birds to create their own kingdom in the sky between the warring gods in heaven and tempestuous mortals on earth. Loosely inspired by the liminality—the interfacing of the threshold between two planes—of such an imagined space, Indian artist Surendran Nair’s new body of work in “Cuckoonebulopolis: (Flora and) Fauna,” presented in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Aicon Gallery, explores notions of indeterminacy and ambiguity, while intending to push the viewer to consider new hypothetical realms of possibilities.

One of the best ways to see the Washington, D.C.-based Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk's large chalk mural at the North Carolina Museum of Art is to turn your back on it and look around the rest of the gallery it's in.

New York’s Aicon Gallery unveiled nearly half a century of work by the prolific Indian painter Anjolie Ela Menon in her first-ever retrospective exhibition in the United States. While the New Delhi-based artist has previously exhibited stateside, “A Retrospective” featured over 40 paintings and drawings from Menon’s oeuvre, offering American audiences a rare glimpse of early pieces borrowed from private collections alongside more recent works.

In an interview with artnet News, Menon elaborated on her roots, her spiritual inspiration, and her artistic practice.

We are delighted to offer our congratulations to artist and friend Saad Qureshi on his participation in the exhibition Tread Softly at Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s 40th anniversary. The exhibition will run from the May 27th through September 3rd, 2017.

A career spanning over five decades, Menon’s aim, as is witnessed in her bio is to “defy categorization”, which she has successfully achieved. Her work has distinct influences of Byzantine art, her figures reminiscent of icons seen in early Christian art with beautiful rendering of Indian themes. The amalgamation of the western style with the eastern subject is a visual treat for the senses and I wandered around the exhibition trying to soak up everything in one day.

The first North American solo exhibition of Ernest Mancoba included four small paintings ranging in date from 1958 to 1985 (one is undated) and some twenty works on paper (many of them likewise undated, but the others are mostly from the early 1990s), giving art lovers on this side of the Atlantic at least a nodding acquaintance with an oeuvre I suspect we are going to get to know much better in coming years.

From 1983 to 2009, a grisly civil war gripped the island nation of Sri Lanka. In the aftermath, 13 artists unpacked the trauma of war as part of the group exhibition “Portraits of Intervention” at Aicon Gallery in New York. Curator Bansie Vasvani said she was drawn to the organic quality of these artists’ responses to the bloodshed, as well as the variation in form found in those reactions.

In a distinctive career spanning more than five decades, the Pakistani-born, Britain-based artist, writer, publisher, and occasional curator Rasheed Araeen has like no other practitioner radically questioned the art world’s fixation on Western-dominated artistic histories and discourses.

For Mancoba, this freedom also meant release from art that had to look African or Western; he could forge what he saw as a utopian synthesis. Accordingly, the work at Aicon, all from after Cobra dissolved in 1951, thwarts easy cultural readings. In small oil paintings, abstract strokes and daubs of color coalesce into sketchy, featureless figures; in related ink drawings they resemble large-headed African sculptures. Other ink drawings are entirely abstract, made up cursive forms that, like characters from an imagery alphabet, spin and tumble across a page.

In a year marked by migration and displacement, artists at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 frame the idea of home and away.

The New York season saw some fine gallery shows.

Pakistanis have many many talents. Stalking, creeping and making up the most absurd things about other people. But other than that there are Pakistanis with real talent and they deserve as much of our attention for hustling and making themselves a name with their insane creativity.
Here’s our jaw-dropping list of amazing Pakistani artists that NEED to be followed right now.

The ongoing intriguing group show titled Delicate Bond of Steel is a result of the unique exchange between Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai and Aicon Gallery in New York. The latter’s first gallery show in the country, hosted by the South Mumbai exhibition space, features works of several South Asian artists based out of Australia, the U.S., Bangladesh and India.

"Aicon Gallery, a New York space that focuses on South East Asian art in particular, will bring works by Rasheed Araeen, Saad Qureshi and Irfan Hassan to the capital. The gallery also participates in Art Dubai, but sees the proximity to the museums in the capital as an important reason also to attend Abu Dhabi Art."

"Mumbai’s Chatterjee and Lal and New York’s Aicon Gallery talk to us about their upcoming gallery swap and why it’s a refreshing change from art fairs."

"In times of turmoil between India and Pakistan, an artistic exchange seeks to promote harmony and highlight a common culture through art."

We are thrilled to announce the participation of Rasheed Araeen in the 57th Edition of the Venice Biennale, which runs from May 13 through November 26, 2017. Additionally, we are pleased to announce his participation in Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece from April 8 through July 16, 2017, and Kassel, Germany from June 10 to September 17. The projects will lead up to the opening of his major Retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, which will run from December 2, 2017 to April 8, 2018.

"Tim Smith-Laing talks to Rasheed Araeen about six decades of art making, writing and publishing."

We are delighted to announce the New York premier of the first installment of BBC Four's documentary series Treasures of the Indus - Pakistan Unveiled, hosted by Sona Dutta, on Friday, October 21, 2016 at 6pm. 

We are delighted to announce that a special exhibition showcasing the full retrospective of the works of Rasheed Araeen will be held at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands from December 2, 2017 through April 8, 2018. The exhibition will showcase 60 years of Araeen's works, including significant institutional and private loans, selections that form the artist’s archives, and works realized specifically for the exhibition

The selection of artwork is divided into two important sets - the first, from the artist’s early days in Karachi delving into the abstract scene that led to his groundbreaking introduction of the kinetic into Minimalist art. The second a series of new canvases exploring color-field, movement, and depth through checkered grids derived from traditional Islamic architectural and textile patterning. When combined together these form a trajectory mapping the artist’s 60 year long constantly evolving and highly dynamic oeuvre and artistic career.

Aicon Gallery is delighted to offer our warmest congratulations to artist and friend Saad Qureshi on being commissioned by NOVA to create a major new site-specific public installation for the district of Victoria in Central London. The project launches on November 22, 2016 and "looks at the portability of landscapes, and the human mind as a vehicle that allows places to travel, to be carried in the memory from one location to another,” Qureshi explains.

We are delighted to announce the participation of Salman Toor in the 2016 edition of the prestigious Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which runs from December 12, 2016 through March 29, 2017. Toor's work, installed in the Aspinwall section of the Biennale, will consist of a large installation of works on canvas both inspired by and presented alongside his multi-media collaboration with exiled Pakistani poet Hasan Mujtaba, which was born of the artist's 2015 exhibition Resident Alien at Aicon Gallery, New York.

We are excited to announce the inclusion of Rasheed Araeen in the upcoming exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945 - 1965, on view at Haus de Kunst, Munich, Germany from October 14, 2016 through March 26, 2017. Alongside Araeen's works My First Sculpture (1959) and Burning Bicycle Tires (1959-61), the exhibition features the work of Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and many others. "The exhibition examines the vibrant and turbulent postwar period as a global phenomenon for the first time in recent exhibition history. In eight dramatic chapters, the exhibition guides visitors through the first 20 years following the end of World War II..."

We are pleased to annouce that Rasheed Araeen will be speaking at the Guggenheim New York on Friday Sept. 23, 2016 at 2pm as part of the museum's seires of lectures (De)Coupling as Discourse on the Global South, taking place concurrent with the exhibition But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, on view until October 5, 2016. The discussion, organized by Sara Raza, will explore "the autonomous rise of contemporary art in the Global South, this two-day symposium traces aesthetic and contextual change to identify an elastic discourse around global visual culture."

I fell in love with Pakistani Art in New York City. Pakistan has once again made headlines in New York City, but this time it’s for a good reason. Go Figureis a group show of young aspiring artists from Pakistan, showcased at Aicon Art Gallery in the East Village area of the city.

Putting South Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern artists in dialogue with the canon of Minimalism complicates its history in order to argue for its reframing today.

We are delighted to announce that Rasheed Araeen's work Lovers (1968) is now on view in the exhibition Between Object and Architecture (June 16-October 14, 2016) at the Tate Modern in London. 

Aicon Gallery is proud to announce the most recent set of insitutional acquistions by artist Rasheed Araeen. Since Araeen's last solo exhibition, Minimalism Then and Now, held at Aicon Gallery in May, 2015, we are delighted to have placed his work with the following collections. The Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi - Chakras (1969-70), The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY - Pehli Si Muhabut (1971/2015), The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi - Rang Baranga II (1969/2014), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Chaar Yaar II (1968), and The Art Institute of Chicago, IL - Punj Neelay (1970).

The recent Met Breuer survey of work by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) was a first exposure for many New Yorkers to a Minimalist-style strain in contemporary South Asian art. In reality, the presence of that aesthetic has long been,and continues to be, substantial, as this tender show at the Aicon Gallery, “Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures,” demonstrates.

Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures,” on view through July 2 at Aicon Gallery in New York, attempts to flip this attitude forward and outward, strategically pushing the past into and through an expanded present. Citing the historian of minimalism James Meyer, for whom the movement was fundamentally irreducible — a “field of difference,” as he wrote his 2001 volume “Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties” — exhibition co-curator Murtaza Vali stated on a recent afternoon at the gallery his belief that “other minimal futures are possible, and here are some examples of how it has happened

We are pleased to announce that Rasheed Araeen's work will be on view in the exhibition Defining Sculpture at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The exhibition, which centers around the question of "What sculpture is and is not" runs from June 18 - October 9, 2016, and is comprised of work from the museum's permanent collection, featuring artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Tara Donovan, and many others. Araeen's work was acquired by the museum for their permanent collection in Spring of 2015.

Curated by Murtaza Vali and Prajit Dutta, this exhibition features artists hailing from or affiliated with South Asia and the broader Middle East. It focuses on Minimalism as a capacious philosophical concept that draws together non-Western practitioners from different generations. The works end up defying this aesthetic categorization, however, as there is a subtle emotional tactility throughout the show that enables content—personal, political—that, of course, runs counter to chilly, textbook Minimalism.

Similarly, only Aicon Gallery, isolated on a block near the Bowery, is likely to come up with the focused look at the Indian modernist S. H. Raza that it gives us here.

Aicon Gallery congratulates artists Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Mohammed Kazem on their participation in the  Guggenheim New York's first major survey of art from North Africa and the Middle East, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, running from April 29 - October 5, 2016. We are honored to be showing both artists, concurrent with the Guggenheim, in our exhibition Between Structure and Matter: Other Minimal Futures, on view from May 26 - July 2, 2016. The Guggenheim exhibition "through painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and video...presents a spectrum of artistic voices and critical concerns from a rapidly evolving region."

Concurrent with the display of La prière des absents in Marrakech, in New York the artist recently had a solo exhibition at Aicon Gallery, Love Side by Side with the Soul, where one could come closer to the surface of his vases and view them with other works, such as a series of banners called The Invisible Masters. Yet in spite of the ability to almost touch the ceramics in New York, one still cannot easily read all the words. Standing close to one vase from La prière, one could just make out the name of the artist’s mother, Rahima, repeating in reverse, and force oneself to read other words backward.

Rachid Koraichi, who has been widely exhibited internationally for decades, is only now having his first New York solo exhibition. Born in Algeria in 1947, he came from a family of Quranic scholars and copyists in a Sufi tradition. He trained as a calligrapher before studying painting and printmaking in Paris in the 1970s and has made the written word, as a conveyor of spiritual philosophy, poetry and politics, his primary medium. Just as language serves as a visual binder in many Islamic cultures, so it does in Mr. Koraichi’s formally diverse but completely of-a-piece show, “Love Side by Side With the Soul,” at Aicon Gallery.

Aicon Gallery congratulates artist Rachid Koraichi on his participation in the 2016 Marrakech Biennale, Not New Now, running from Feburary 24 - August 5, 2016. During the Biennale's run, we are honored to be hosting the first major showing of Koraichi's work in New York, in collaboration with October Gallery, London, with the exhibition Rachid Koraichi | Love Side by Side with the Soul, on view from March 3 - April 16, 2016.

Rekha Rodwittiya’s iconic female figures loom large. An amalgamation of Indian classical and tribal images, Rodwittiya’s asexual goddesses evade easy categorization. Currently in her solo exhibition Rituals of Memory at Aicon Gallery, they command an uncanny presence and beg scrutiny.

Prominent Baroda-based feminist artist Rekha Rodwittiya, who is the founder of The Collective Studio Baroda, is back here after two decades with a major exhibition at the Aicon Gallery, ‘The Rituals of Memory: Personal Folklores and Other Tales’, which runs from Feb. 4 through Feb. 27th.

Rasheed Araeen should not need an introduction: he is one of the foremost pioneers of Minimalist sculpture in Britain. And yet, (with his first exhibition in Asia taking place now at Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong), that there is a need to introduce Araeen refers to something that has driven at least part of this artist's 50-year career.

Salman Toor is the best kind of contemporary painter: funny, insightful, and not afraid to get personal. His colorful, figurative images are both intimate and relatable, featuring crowds of people engaging in romantic or imaginative adventures, filled with references to the artist’s many travels and international background.

New York City has facilitated my cobbling together of seemingly divergent understandings of developing societies seething in turmoil, along with the microcosms of cultures like Brooklyn’s art scene. Since I left Lahore, my work has developed in more abstract directions in order to host and superimpose imagined narratives and homelands in which personal and global concerns intersect.

Salman Toor’s insular scenes of life in Pakistan have vanished. Instead ghosts, hobos, poets, exiles, counts, ascetics, rabble-rousers, vagrants, and partygoers inhabit a no-man’s-land where time stands still. In Toor’s second solo exhibition at New York’s Aicon Gallery, Resident Alien, an artist possessed by a spirit to experiment and plunge into a new world has emerged.

The Kominas brought the curtain down on Asian Contemporary Arts Week at the Aicon Gallery on November 8 surrounded by the exhibition of works from Salman Toor. Like some of Toor's art on the wall, the Kominas tackle racism, Islamophobia, American paranoia and stereotypes (the name of their latest album is, indeed, Stereotype). A fierce rock band in the classic punk vein, the Kominas's audience was flailing along with the band's energetic performance.

A mini-retrospective of M.F. Husain — the celebrated and colorfully controversial Indian painter who died in London in 2011, at the age of 95 — runs through October 24 at Aicon Gallery in NoHo. Covering six decades in approximately 24 paintings, the show affords a rarely seen overview of India’s Picasso, with excellent examples from every decade of his wildly prolific oeuvre.

Since his beginnings in the 1940s, Husain sought to radically redefine and redirect the course of Indian painting, paving the way for Modern Indian art’s now recognized presence on the international stage.

Acknowledgement for octogenarian Rasheed Araeen’s contribution to Minimalism is long overdue. Marginalised and overshadowed for the most part by American stalwarts such as Sol
LeWitt, Carl Andre and Donald Judd, the pioneers of the movement during the 1960s, Araeen’s institutional recognition has only been recent.

Overlooked amid all these accomplishments was Mr. Araeen’s art, a selection of which is at Aicon Gallery inhis first New York solo exhibition. Trained as a civil engineer, he became an artist after seeing Anthony Caro’s sculptures. His own early pieces combined Mr. Caro’s use of industrial materials with openwork structures adapted from architecture. In the early 1960s he developed a version of what would come to be called Minimalism before its introduction in New York by Donald Judd and others.

THE DAILY PIC: I raved about the British Minimalism of Rasheed Araeenwhen it was on view last year in the Jewish Museum group show called “Other Primary Structured". Now Araeen has a solo at Aicon Gallery in New York; it includes today's Daily Pic, titled First Structure and conceived in 1966-67 (i.e., at the same moment when New York's Minimal art was coming together).

With art from regions as diverse as Africa, Eastern Europe, the MIddle East, and South Africa, the ninth Dubai Art Fair 2015 established its credentials as a global player.

At the Art Dubai 2015, Pakistani artists in significant numbers sought to introduce different facades of social, political and religious realities.

After Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid posted a picture of this beautiful work on social media, it quickly became the fair’s most photographed piece of art. The suspended black cube, laser-cut with Islamic patterns that cast shadows on the wall from a single light bulb within it, is a 2014 piece by Pakistani artist Agha and was exhibited by Aicon Gallery from New York. Throughout the event, streams of people gathered around it to catch it at the best angle.

At a time when cultural frontiers are closing and horizons narrowing, Art Dubai is broadening the international conversation about art. For that reason it is the world’s most important and radical art fair.

Aicon Gallery, a New York and London-based gallery that specialises in art from the Indian subcontinent is one of the 97 galleries bringing their art to Art Dubai next week. Interestingly, Harry Hutchison, the gallery director decided that as well as the four day fair, he would collaborate with a local gallery Empty 10 to put on a short exhibition preceding the fair. I find this a fascinating way to penetrate the local audience and so, ahead of the VIP opening tomorrow night, I caught up with him for a chat.

Aicon Gallery is a contemporary art gallery specializing in emerging Indian and Pakistani artists. Formerly Gallery ArtsIndia, Aicon Gallery was one of the first platforms for Indian art in the United States. Today, the primary goal of the gallery is to foster dialogue between South Asian and Western art at their New York and London locations.

The Aicon exhibition illuminates the astonishing fluidity with which Suri moves between worlds. "I like his drive, which goes in so many directions — writing, music, visual arts," says Salman Rushdie, the author with whom Suri has kindled an unlikely friendship. "And he's helped me to get a better understanding of a younger generation of Indian Americans.

The show fuses Pakistani with Indian, Islam with Hinduism and North American with South Asian, without highlighting the major chasms separating these dichotomies in the Eastern world. The subtext of the works largely communicate with Suri’s music: both are compendiums of deep knowledge of pop culture and both American and South Asian.

57 Great Jones is also just a block away from the Aicon Gallery, where as part of the lead-up to his first full-length solo album, Eat Pray Thug, Heems curated an art show of the same name, featuring desi artists like Ratna Gupta, Ranbir Kaleka and Abdullah MI Syed — as well as art he created in partnership with Chiraag Bhakta, aka Pardon My Hindi. As in his music, Heems’ visual art references borrow heavily from his north Indian family’s experience in the United States.

Now, however, Suri has jumped into the (marginally) more serious business of curating his own gallery show: “Eat Pray Thug,” the same moniker he’s given his forthcoming solo album, which runs through March 10 at Aicon Gallery on Great Jones Street. The multimedia group show of artists with ties to India and Pakistan, including Suri himself, also features a parallel series of live events, including an appearance from Muslim punk band The Kominas on March 7.

This show is really cool, we have American artists, Indian artists, Pakistani artists. It’s interesting to see it all together and how they interact,” Bhakta said. “Instead of putting us in an ‘Indian’ bucket, this show is trying to burst that bubble. That first layer of American culture is pretty special. We are not Indian, we are American. It’s cool to experiment with that and see what comes out of it.

The art fair season in Asia ushers in a new exciting year for contemporary art, starting with Art Stage Singapore and the India Art Fair taking place back-to-back during the last week of January 2015. Art Radar caught up with 6 galleries hailing from different corners of the world to find out about their participation in both fairs and what draws them to Asia

The show is a collection of etchings and silkscreen prints that thrived on shared experiences of looking, and of semblance. As arbitrators and translators of their respective cultures, the artists, through their works, revealed a yearning for a kind of order. Collectively their works swayed between the creating and breaking of repetitive forms and grids.

Aicon Gallery in downtown Manhattan currently has an excellent exhibition up, Readymade: Contemporary Art from Bangladesh. It’s the obscure object of my art desire: a summer show offering a take on materials and craft that ranges from the familiar to the utopian-exotic. That the show seems to stand in for real politics with an indignant view of the use and abuse of labor, activism, and the status of women in Bangladesh — and that it does all this while hinting that it’s just the tip of the sinking iceberg — make Readymade a must-see.

The Bangladeshi contemporary art scene began to grow in the 1990s, twenty years after the country gained independence from Pakistan in 1971. Today, Dhaka burgeons with young talent, with new art venues sprouting up alongside established art spaces. The exhibition “Readymade” features nine exciting Bangladeshi artists who explore diverse social, political and economic issues in their country.

Aicon Gallery’s first solo exhibition in New York of contemporary art from Bangladesh is off to a good start. Tilted “Readymade,” which consists of work by established and emerging artists compressed into a relatively short time frame that began after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, displays an art scene edgy for its political content, talent and imagination.

Comprising twenty seven paintings and three drawings, the show is dominated by a collection of paintings from the 1960s, when Sadequain lived and worked in Paris. Titled The Lost Exhibition, this set of eight paintings are dancing figures of calligraphy; lyrical despite their scale.

Similarities in approaches and content of this art with parallel situations elsewhere are such that the general resonance of conflict and change, vagueness and clarity, mix of Eastern and Western vocabulary, hybridity and mutation is easily identifiable. New generation artists are flexible and free from the weight of traditional art methodologies. Using renewed methods of thinking and addressing problems to create relevant art, they are creating a vocabulary that global audiences are also able to understand, and relate to.

The London-based artist Saad Qureshi shows his latest mixed media works at Manhattan’s South Asian art hotspot, Aicon Gallery, until the end of this month. Although he is trying to adopt a more universal visual language, his work remains, like so many Pakistani artists, rooted in the rich cultural metaphors and latent violence of his country of origin.

Starting with his own memory that Qureshi builds his amalgamated version of traditional tales presented in mythical landscapes and structures that marry seamlessly Islamic and Christian imagery. I found the works arresting and richly layered with not only memory of a culture but brimming with fresh possibilities.

Doyle New York’s November 13, 2012 auction of Modern and Contemporary Art auction presented a wide range of paintings and sculpture by some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most prominent artists. Works by American, European, Latin American and Asian artists encompassed artistic movements from Cubism and Expressionism through the present day. The sale set another world auction record for the Indian/American artist Natvar Bhavsar (b. 1934) when a large abstract from 2000 titled Sundervana sold for a record $53,125 against an estimate of $20,000-30,000.