New Delhi / New Wave

Mirror of the “globalised village” and land of great economic disparity; mine of new technologies and profoundly backward country. This is the India of many contradictions which in recent years, among the clamour of Bollywood and the notes of Bhangra music, has become famous for its rapid reawakening: the new literature, the new fashion, the new economy and now (after the Chinese, South American and African wave) we have the new art whose most significant exponents and works are collected in this book, with an abundance of images. The book brings together the works of Ravinder Reddy, an artist who reinterprets the ancient Hindu statue tradition to deal with contemporary Indian woman in a pop key, and those of Pushpamala which are portraits of the female stars of Bollywood and religious Indian women. Religion is also to the fore in Anita Dube’s video installations which revisit the ancient Hindu iconographic tradition through the theme of alms, while Shilpa Gupta belongs to the generation of artists active on multimedia platforms. One of the best known artists on the international scene, Subodh Gupta deals with everyday objects in bulky metal sculptures depicting bicycles, scooters and cars. Reinforced by an increasingly growing popularity among public and critics, contemporary Indian art is widely documented in the book through the work of 14 artists (Ravinder Reddy, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, N Pushpamala, A. Balasubramaniam, Anita Dube, Krishnaraj Chonat, Shilpa Gupta, Sonia Khurana, Bharat Sikka, Thukral & Tagra, Tejal Shah, Kriti Arora, Baba Anand).

Writer, curator, Jérôme Neutres is the author of various texts about contemporary art. He served in India as Cultural Attaché of the French Embassy from 2002 to 2006. He is currently living and working in New York as French Cultural Attaché to the United States.

A writer from New Delhi, Radhika Jha is the author of Smell, a novel translated in twenty languages, and of a collection of stories The Elephant and the Maruti, both published in Englòish by Penguin. She belongs to the same generation of the artists presented in the book.