Arpana Caur

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Arpana Caur, 2015

Arpana Caur (born September 4, 1954 in New Delhi ) is an Indian painter and graphic artist .

Life

Arpana Caur comes from a Sikh family who fled to the Republic of India from Pakistani West Punjab in 1947 during the turmoil over the partition of British India . Her mother is the writer Ajit Kaur (* 1934), who writes in Punjabi . Kaur or Caur (pronunciation kor ) is a religious surname worn by all female Sikhs. She has not had her first name Arpana since she was born, but adopted it herself at the age of 15, as an expression of a personal development process in which she was concerned with independent thinking.

Arpana Caur graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in literature with a Master of Arts degree. She worked herself into painting largely autodidactically. She received her training in etching technology in 1982 at Garhi Studios in New Delhi, the facilities of which she continues to use for her graphic work. Her pictorial work received attention even in her youth. Since around 1990 she has been one of the most important artists in India. Her paintings are in collections of important museums around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Singapore Art Museum in Singapore .

In the series Face to Face of British broadcaster BBC a television interview was sent to her in April of 2002.

The 25th edition (anniversary edition) of the Indian book series Limca Book of Records , published in 2014, had the motto Empowering Women and a. also Arpana Caur.

At the end of 2016, the Bangalore branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art honored Arpana Caur with a retrospective entitled “Four Decades: A Painter's Journey”.

Arpana Caur supports several social projects in India, including a home for lepers and projects for poor and old widows. She is also committed to the peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India; She is one of the signatories of a letter of protest to the Indian President, in which the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu nationalists is condemned.

plant

Arpana Caur works figuratively, with a few large figures often dominating. In the meantime she has developed her own style, which she modified, but not fundamentally changed. Large eyes, for example, are typical. In some of her figures, she consciously ties in with traditional Indian sculpture, such as sculptures from the Gupta Empire or bronze sculptures from the time of the Chola Empire. In some works she adopts peculiarities of perspective from Indian miniature painting. She also draws inspiration from the literature of the Punjab and religious bhakti poetry.

Her artistic forms of expression are diverse. First of all, her mostly large-format oil and acrylic paintings should be mentioned. She created around ten wall paintings on external facades, for example on the administration building of the South Asian Economic Community ( SAARC ) in Kathmandu , Nepal. (More examples of murals in the section “Community work”.) As a graphic artist, she prefers etching . Occasionally she creates installations such as those in honor of the famous Indian artist MF Husain . She illustrated a picture book for children about Guru Nanak , the founder of Sikhism.

Picture themes

Arpana Caur's early pictures from the mid-1970s mostly have an autobiographical reference. The urban chaos of the Patel Nagar district in western Delhi, where she lived at the time, is often discussed. The starting point for these and many other pictures up to the mid-1990s are everyday topics, whereby the visual implementation increases into the universally applicable. This also includes women's motifs, which Caur takes up with an emancipatory and feminist intention (women as victims, solidarity among women, etc.). The picture Green Circle (1989) shows a girl surrounded by small-format scenes of lively traffic; it is currently drawing a green circle around it to magically protect itself from the threat. The scene refers to an episode in the Indian national epic Ramayana , in which Lakshmana draws a protective circle around the threatened Sita .

Another topic is dealing with war and politically motivated violence. The violent riots against Sikhs in 1984 gave rise to a series with the title World Goes On ; human violence is juxtaposed with natural motifs, where time continues unchanged. In the center of the painting Landscape with Knives (1989) yellow flames flicker as a symbol of a basic mood prepared for violence; in the left half of the picture this mood is additionally underlined by a multitude of knives, while on the right half of the picture a musician can cool off with the power of his music. Caur was one of ten artists worldwide who were invited to make an artistic contribution in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing on Hiroshima . For this purpose she created a triptych with the title Where are all the flowers gone? which is located in the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art. The left part symbolizes the beauty of the country before the destruction, the brown middle part shows dead soldiers and the yellow-black part on the right shows a widow under a dark cloud with radioactive rain.

Some of her pictures with religious motifs have been published in books. In the book Naam roop , each poem by Shailendra Gulhati is juxtaposed with a thematically appropriate painting by Arpana Caur, for example with the title Kabir or Nanak .

The subject of time is particularly important to her. In this context, the motif of scissors appears often, partly in the hand of a woman who is cutting a thread, partly separately as a tool without a person using it. The woman with scissors has a similar symbolic meaning as the deadly Moira Atropos of Greek mythology. The scissors act as a metaphor for time (or for the end of life).

Community work

In the 1990s, a series of joint works with Indian folk artists from the indigenous people of the Warli and Godna, who live in the Madhubani region of the Indian state of Bihar , were created. She painted over z. For example, the floral motifs by Godna artist Sat Narain Pande with depictions of workers and traffic lights, in order to express the contrasts between tradition and modernity as well as between rural and urban life.

Together with the German painter Sönke Nissen-Knaack, she created two large wall paintings on exterior facades in 2000. The theme of the painting on a house facade in Hamburg-Altona is the juxtaposition of the cyclical understanding of time in Eastern cultures with the western linear understanding of time. The mural in New Delhi was the first Indian mural in public space. These two works were created as part of “ Mural Global ”, a worldwide wall painting project for Agenda 21 under the auspices of UNESCO.

Web links

Note: The copyright must be observed for all external links with images of works of art by Arpana Caur.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e General Artists Dictionary , Volume 17, KG Saur, Munich 1997, p. 342.
  2. ↑ Suneet Chopra: The Art of Arpana Caur. Roli Books, New Delhi 2001, p. 6 f.
  3. ↑ Interview in: Arpana Caur . SikhiWiki. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  4. ↑ Arpana Caur . SikhiWiki. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  5. ^ (Hi) Story of the Garhi Printmaking Studios, New Delhi
  6. ↑ Jutta Ströter-Bender: Contemporary Art of the “ Third World ”. DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-2665-3 , p. 177.
  7. ^ Arpana Caur: Museum collections
  8. ↑ BBC interview with Arpana Caur (April 24, 2002)
  9. ↑ Srijani Ganguly: Limca book to celebrate Indian women. In: www.indiatoday.in. March 5, 2014, accessed May 6, 2018 .
  10. ^ Cut to story. In: The Hindu . November 15, 2016, accessed June 11, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Arpana Caur: About me ( Memento from September 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Letter to the President of India after the demolition of Babri Masjid
  13. ↑ Suneet Chopra: The Art of Arpana Caur. Roli Books, New Delhi 2001, pp. 5 f.
  14. ↑ a b c Amrita Jhaveri: A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists. India Book House, Mumbai 2005, ISBN 81-7508-423-5 , p. 101.
  15. ↑ Murals & Installations
  16. ^ MF Husain, by Arpana Caur . The Indian Express. June 8, 2012. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  17. ↑ Mala Dayal: Nanak: the Guru. Rupa & Co, New Delhi 2005, ISBN 81-291-0679-5 .
  18. ↑ Review: Distinctive strokes . The Tribune (India). June 19, 2005. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  19. ↑ a b c d e f Suneet Chopra: The Art of Arpana Caur. Roli Books, New Delhi 2001, unpaginated image section.
  20. ↑ Picture "Landscape with Knives" ( Memento from February 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  21. ^ Image "Where are all the flowers gone?" ( Memento from February 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  22. ↑ Shailendra Gulhati, Arpana Caur: Naam Roop. A tribute to the Divine. Digital Publications, New Delhi 2006. (In some cases the equivalent is only figuratively applicable.)
  23. ↑ Interview with Arpana Caur
  24. ^ Mural in Hamburg-Altona
  25. ^ Mural in New Delhi
personal data
SURNAME Caur, Arpana
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arpana Cour
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th September 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH New Delhi