MG Road

 

Dr Rahul Baxi shoots Mumbai like no one else with a mobile phone. His beautiful images are on exhibition at the Terrace Gallery of JJ Art Gallery, Kalaghoda, this week. 

The remarkable thing about having an exhibition at JJ is the walk-in public and their diversity. It's primarily the common people and even quite a few tourists. Different from the other art galleries in our city, the place is not intimidating, and it's also often the first place many Mumbaikars come face to face with the art scene in the city, even in this age of the internet. 

From what I could see, the images of the city, through the doctor's special eye were a hit with the public. 

Vashi

Interiors: Vishnudas Bhave Hall, Vashi

Narayan A Sawant Rd

Chirodeep Chowdhury has a beautiful exhibition at Project 88. He leaves through the wonders that were trapped in the books of Public Free Reading Library with writer Jerry Pinto and set them free. It's full of wonders. 

Matunga CR

Work Space Mumbai: Artist's studio.

Saillesh Acharekar is an artist who likes to paint and try some chemical experiments of different surfaces like wood and metal to create art. These days he's perfecting ways of giving some chamkoing selective angle effect on flat surface and it works amazingly well. You will be able to see it at his next exhibition whenever it happens.

He happens to be an old colleague of mine and I happened to visit his den. Here are a few images from there and a sneak preview of his paintings.


 

Some new experiments with light and paint.





1980s cupboard and shelves in his Matunga home and studio.

Colaba

On Assignment. 
Sudhir Patwardhan - Artist


I'm not familiar with the art scene in Mumbai but this man, a doctor, captures the mood of the Mumbai to Pune monstercities on the faces of his people, and the environment they live in, like no one else. I wish I could click images like them.








Gayatri Jayaraman writes about route maps here in Mint Lounge. From the article: 

"Patwardhan’s gaze in the new works is not judgmental,  it observes a specific disintegration of class—a strain running contrary to the class ideologies evident in his early works. “Earlier there was this sense of camaraderie with people of a certain class because of ideological leanings. Now that has more or less loosened. One still feels sympathetic but the distinctions between class are more blurred today. You no longer speak for individuals, because the individual himself is no longer representative of the whole class,”  

Sudhir Patwardhan says,  “The cities as they are transformed begin to look the same: clones of each other”

"A society that transforms everyone and every place in the same way, is in effect a homogeneous society where it is the individual who is hostile."

See his best work here on his website. 

So see his exhibition called Route Maps at The Guild, Colaba. Details here

Sion Station

The "Meem" Boyz. Me stands for Mohammedan. (The word that the autowalla used instead of the commonly used Muslim.)