Curatorial Note by Sadanand Menon

The retrospective of any artist who has consistently been at work for over five decades, is no longer about the artist per se. It also becomes the narrative of a nation, a region, a school, a style.

His retrospective then, becomes the occasion for an archaeological exploration into the multiple layers of social, historical and aesthetic accumulation that reveal themselves, as clearly as strata in stone.

As a leading contemporary modernist of post-Independence India, S.G. Vasudev’s work takes us into the thick of the debates and turmoil in the sixties within the College of Art, Madras – a pioneering centre for arts education that has received the least critical attention from our art historians. The products of the Madras art movement have, thus, remained confined to the margins of the narrative around mainstream Indian art. This is an injustice that needs to be swiftly corrected.

Vasudev’s work reveals the creative churn among the students and teachers at the Madras Arts College in the mid-sixties. The reputation of the school attracted students from all regions of the sub-continent – Bengal, Gujarat, Bombay, Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and, of course, Tamil Nadu itself. It helped generate its own form of inter-culturalism. And an eclectic art practice grounded solidly in the play with line and surface, significantly absorbed and integrated from prevailing practices of traditional artisans and of ordinary people on the street.

An exposure to Vasudev’s collected work brings us to the centre of these preoccupations with evolving a local, native vocabulary that was, in itself, a critique of Western canons of spatialization and depth. Inspired by the critical indigenism of their mentor K.C.S. Paniker, Vasudev and a group of