Anjolie Ela Menon
GrosvenorVadehra 21 Ryder Street, London SW1Y6PX 1
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njolie Ela Menon (b. 1940 in Bengal) is one of India’s best known artists. She had her first solo exhibition in 1958 in Delhi and the renowned critic Richard Bartholomew while reviewing her debut predicted: “I have no doubt that before long this gifted young woman will be joining the ranks of our very best painters”. These words have been truly prophetic and Menon’s trajectory over the last six decades is testimony to the evolution of an artist who has defied easy classification and who has broken fresh ground with confident panache. The current exhibition is an overview of Menon’s considerable body of work that spans half a century. A figurative painter in the main, who has dwelt on the human protagonist, she once remarked wryly: “In India can one be otherwise?” Menon stubbornly remained a figurative painter through the years when abstraction was in vogue. Even in her landscapes cityscapes and interiors traces of the missing protagonist are evident by their very absence. For example, the Khatia set in a bleak landscape bears the imprint of the person who has just vacated it, leaving the crows to examine the detritus. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Menon has contributed to the aesthetic vocabulary of Indian art with her distinctive female nude – a melancholic figure whose latent sensuality is matched by a yearning that tugs at the viewer with an empathetic resonance. The artist’s forte is her ability in her more painterly work to evoke subterranean emotions and associations that take the subject of her painting and the viewer out of the frame. It is that which is suggested elliptically and subtly invoked by negation that imbues Menon’s work with a very special visual texture. More often than not her paintings hint at a magical, dream world – a very private domain that the artist inhabits with her enigmatic people, animals, birds and in one phase-the lizard. The images of ordinary objects - the chair, the crow, the open window, the picture within the picture, the chequerboard, the serpent – recur so often that they achieve the status of symbol, as do the small embellishments that are synonymous with her signature.
Zara Oil on masonite, 12.5” x 8”, 2013
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Menon’s paintings of the 1960s were marked by a complex mix of untrammeled passion leavened with the pensive. In the next decade, formal art schooling first in Bombay at the Sir JJ School of Art and later in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts gave her work a formal framework. Personal experience is an important ingredient in her oeuvre. Her extensive travels in Italy, France and Spain and the USSR and an exposure to Byzantine art in Greece left a lasting impact of early Christian art on her work. Her style was marked by the lustre of Byzantine art and the Romanesque influences were noticeable. Apart from the brooding nude inspired by Giselbertus’ Romanesque sculpture of Eve, her subject matter included priests tinged with an ecclesiastical severity and haunting Madonnas - the Slavic overtones reflecting an allegorical quality. Gradually the synthesis of different cultures took place. Perhaps this gave a visual definition to the transmutations that were taking place within Menon’s own personal life coloured by the awareness engendered by her multiple identities. Relentless exploration saw the artist create a seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter that hinted at shades of Hieronymus Bosch and the Pre-Raphaelites. Nubile, diaphanously clad women (only half revealed) animals, birds, reptiles and apocalyptic male figures inhabited and impinged upon a mythical world that was excavated from the artist’s sub-conscious. 3
Yet, this imagery did not relate to any identifiable collective myth and in a more introspective moment the artist noted of these paintings: “It is a lonely moonscape of my own making, trespassed upon by the occasional bird or animal, and the protagonist is often the person I yearn to touch, the person I long to be.” Gradually her work acquired a stamp of individual authenticity and a distinctive signature. A stint in the former Soviet Union in the late 60s and her Bangladesh series of 1971 reflect an acute artistic sensitivity to external stimulus, in as much as the series of paintings of close family and friends and her current interaction with inhabitants of the Nizamuddin basti (the urban village in Delhi where she has her studio) testify to the centrality of her individual vision. In the current show, the internalized distillation of memory, nostalgia and her variegated experiences is often discernible. Several elements in these semi-autobiographical paintings combine to establish a signature that runs through her entire output and is still valid in her current work. Desolation is a quality that is palpable in many of Menon’s paintings and again, one may infer that a sense of loss imbues some of her work a certain profundity. Menon evokes that which is hinted at but not quite visually stated even as the unsung ode wafts across disturbing landscapes. While the window, the crow or the chair recurred through the 1980s, slowly allegory gave way to more direct engagements with subjects close to the artist. Her marriage into a Kerala family and the discovery of a stack of Daguerro-type early photographs in her husband’s ancestral home in Kerala seem to have inspired a series of paintings. South Indian ancestors and young ascetic poojaris and acolytes drawn from the cultural backdrop of the south appear in sepia tones in her paintings of that period, and in a few portraits in this show. The 1990s were marked by a period of experimentation and creative innovation which saw a bold departure from her earlier work. At the time she said “… artists are often trapped in the clichés of their own making….. I seem to have spent the last decade struggling to come out of that trap”. In 2002, Menon was looking at a new source of inspiration – kitsch in its Indian ubiquity. Calendar art that is so distinctively pan–Indian and cinema hoardings that dot the urban and small town landscape are transmuted with confident painterliness and within the rich and translucent palette that defines Menon’s empathy with colours. The much derided popular visual culture that informs the lives of millions is baptized affectionately into the framework of contemporary art. After her historic exhibition ‘Gods and Others’, Menon’s engagement with kitsch and the visual matrix of urban India in our times has made a lasting impression on Indian Art. Many younger artists have either appropriated or have been influenced by this genre thereby celebrating kitsch and bringing it steadily into the mainstream.
coalesces the traditional and post modern with rare panache creating a pastiche with collage and paint. Underlying the slick surfaces of the totally new compu-pictures are echoes of the artist’s earlier work, reinforcing those elements that have been associated with the Menon idiom while achieving a new visual language of intriguing complexity. It would be misleading to suggest that artists work in discrete phases and that the movement from one phase or genre to another is linear and exclusive. An overlap is inherently subjective and over a distinctive five decade period, a visual signature emerges over time. In Menon’s case it is her natural harmony with colour and finely layered surfaces that are recognizable. Menon once noted “I hardly draw, I think in colour. Its depth or intensity, translucence or opacity form the nuances of my whole creative output. It is with colour that one sings, with colour that one plummets the depths. When I dream I see colour… the overlaying of harmony, discord, syncopation…” Over the years Menon has had 42 solo exhibitions and several films have been made on her. Orchestration of all the elements that inform Menon’s deepest concerns were on display at a major retrospective exhibition mounted in Mumbai in 1988 in collaboration with the Times of India. Later in 2002, a larger traveling retrospective mounted by Vadehra Art Gallery was on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, the Chitrakala Parishad in Bangalore and the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi. Invited to the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1989, she has also participated in Indian Triennales and the India Art Summit. Her murals adorn many public buildings in India. A book on her work titled “Anjolie Ela Melon: Paintings in Private collections” and an impressive volume entitled “Through the Patina” have been published. Menon will sign copies of the latter book at the gallery. In recognition of her stature, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco mounted a solo show of her work in mid 2006 which celebrated Menon’s triptych “Yatra” in a six month long exhibition. Menon has been honoured with the Padma Shri (one of the highest civilian awards in India) and the French Chevalier des Arts a et des letters. Her work hangs in the permanent collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, The Benjamin Grey Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, The Chandigarh Museum, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, The Fukuoka Museum, Japan and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in many private and corporate collections in India and abroad. She is married to defense strategist Admiral Raja Menon, has two sons and several grandchildren.
Isana Murti
The small miniatures in this show are the result of the period of experimentation that began in 1992. Menon’s conviction and courage in leaving the safety of her preferred medium oil on masonite – was fraught with considerable uncertainty. In an ongoing engagement with Kitsch, Bollywood posters and street art, Menon imparts objects appropriated from so called “low art” with an aesthetic identity and autonomy. In her inimitably impish manner, Menon 4
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Acolyte Oil on masonite, 12.5” x 8”, 2013
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The Long Wait Oil on masonite, 48” x 24”, 2013
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Mother and Son - I Oil on masonite, 39” x 18”, 2011
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Man on a Red Chair Oil on masonite, 39” x 17”, 2010
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Mother and Son - 2 Oil on masonite, 48� x 24�, 2013
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MIK the Rock Star Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Namboodri Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Clone -II Oil on masonite, 16” x 12”, 2007
Madhava Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
Ruku Oil on masonite, 12”x 8”, 2013
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Birthday Girl Oil on masonite, 36” x 24”, 2013
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Kumbh 2013 the Visarjan Oil on masonite, 48” x 36”, 2013
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Vir Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Pujari Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Ephesus Oil on masonite, 20.5” x 24”, 2013
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Balagopal Oil on masonite, 48” x 36”, 2013
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Madonna Oil on masonite, 12”x 9”, 2013
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Christ Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Goat People - III Oil on masonite, 48” x 36”, 2012
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Landscape Oil on canvas, 25.5” x 20”, 2013
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Portrait of an Artist Oil on masonite, 12” x 8”, 2013
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Endgame Oil on masonite, 12” x 9”, 2013
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Baliavas Oil on masonite, 12” x 8.5”, 2010
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Untitled Oil on masonite, 13” x 11”, 2010
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Untitled Oil on masonite, 13.5” x 11.5”, 2010
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Pentimento - I Collage on paper, 7” x 5.5”, 2013
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Pentimento - II Collage on paper, 8.5” x 7”, 2013
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Pentimento - III Collage on paper, 4” x 6.5”, 2013
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Pentimento - IV Collage on paper, 5.5” x 4”, 2013
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Pentimento - V Collage on paper, 9� x 7�, 2013
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Pentimento - VII Collage on paper, 6” x 4.5”, 2013
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Pentimento - VI Collage on paper, 7” x 4.5”, 2013
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Raja Collage on paper, 5.5” x 6.75”, 2013
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Pentimento - VIII Collage on paper, 5” x 5”, 2013
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ANJOLIE ELA MENON is among India’s leading contemporary artists, and has created a name for herself in the domestic as well as international art scene. Her works are a part of significant museum, private and corporate collections across the globe. Though Menon normally prefers to work with oil on masonite, she has also experimented with other media such as glass, acrylic, computers, ceramics and painted junk. Born in 1940 in West Bengal of mixed Bengali and American parentage, she was a student of Lawrence School, Lovedale, and by the time she left school at the age of 15 she had already sold several paintings. After this, she pursued her studies at Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, and then went on to obtain a degree in English Literature from Delhi University. During this phase, she was influenced by the works of artists like Modigliani and Indian painters like Amrita Shergil and MF Husain. At the age of 18 Anjolie Ela Menon showcased her works in much acclaimed solo exhibitions in Delhi and Mumbai. The French government offered her a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she studied Fresco. Menon utilized this time to travel extensively in Europe and West Asia studying Romanesque and Byzantine art before returning home. She later married her childhood friend, Raja Menon, a young officer in the Indian navy. After her marriage, Menon lived and worked in India, the USSR, the US and Germany. The trajectory of Menon’s career soared steadily upwards in the years to come. Her first solo exhibition was held at 71 Lodhi Estate in 1958 for which the invitation was designed by MF Husain. From forty five solo shows the more important ones are 1959: Bhulabhai Desai Institute, Mumbai; 1965: Blackheath Gallery, UK; 1967: Doma Khudozhnikov, USSR; 1971: Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1972 Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata; 1974 & 76: Chemould Gallery, Mumbai; 1982: Gallerie Radicke, Bonn; 1983 Taj Gallery Mumbai, 1984: Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai; 1984: Winston Gallery, Washington; 1990: Air Gallery, London; 1996: Museum Gallery, Hong Kong; 2000: Wallace Gallery, New York; 2002: Gallery Admit One, Chelsea, New York; 2004: Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi; 2005: Sacred Prism II, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai; 2006: Aicon Gallery, New York; 2006: Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. She has had two retrospectives, 1988: Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai and 2000: National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. Her works are regularly sold at all global auctions including Sotheby’s and Christies and have been aquired by several museums in India and abroad including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, Benjamin Gray Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and Fukuoka Museum, Japan. Every important corporate collection in India hangs her work including Tatas, Birlas, Larsen and Toubro, TIFR, Shah House, Shell, Reliance, ITC, Times House, Hindustan Times, CMC and many others. She has represented India at the Algiers Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale, and three Triennales in India. She has participated in several group shows in India and abroad including Victoria & Albert Museum London and shows in Singapore, Bangkok, Washington, New York and Palo Alto. She was the co-curator for a French exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art. She has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the Art Purchase Committee and Advisory body of National Gallery of Modern Art and recently curated an international show for the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. She is also a well known muralist whose ‘Buddha’ mural in the Prime Minister’s reception lounge at the Indira Gandhi International Airport is now famous and several other murals in public spaces such as the Esplanade Metro Station, Kolkata, Mumbai International Airport and many five star hotels. Menon is also a social activist, who supports the education of disadvantaged children. Based on her life and work, a book “Anjolie Ela Menon: Paintings in Private Collections” has been published and several films have been made on her by Doordarshan and CNN. She has been honoured with the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian awards in India. She was also awarded the “Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters” by the French Government. She is married to strategic analyst and writer Admiral Raja Menon. They have two sons and four grandchildren.
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GrosvenorVadehra presents ANJOLIE ELA MENON 7 - 27 June, 2013 21 Ryder Street, London SW1Y6PX Š Published by Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013 D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India T +91 11 24622545 | E art@vadehraart.com W www.vadehraart.com Design: Suhani Arora Sen Printing: Archana, www.archanapress.com ISBN : 978-93-80001-62-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrival system, without prior permission in writing from the copyright-holder/publisher.
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