ONE OF INDIA’S greatest modern painters was Maqbool Fida Husain (1915-2011), who was born in what is now Maharahtra. He studied art at the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay.
While visiting Bombay’s branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) on 2 January 2026, we saw two of Husain’s drawings and two of his paintings. They had been hinges next to a portrait of the artist by Anil Naik (born 1959), a graduate of Sir JJ School School of Art.
Husain’s painting at LIC
From the NGMA, we made our way to the huge Bombay headquarters of the LIC insurance company. My wife had read that this place is home to a painting by MF Husain. Nobody in the building knew about it despite the fact that the painting occupies most of one wall of the foyer of one wing of the building.
Husain’s painting at LIC is in need of some conservation work. The lower part of it is hidden from view because an x-ray machine used to check bags etc has been placed against it. It was painted in 1963 and depicts Indian life and culture.
It is to be hoped that thus fine mural will neither be allowe to fade away nor destroyed.
ROSNEFT IS A Russian company that supplies oil to India. The company has sponsored an exhibition, “Dream Vision”, that we visited in Bombay’s branch of India’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA). The show will continue until 15 January 2026.
The works on display are by a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, Nikas Safronov (born in the USSR in 1956). So far, he has painted portraits of at least 300 notable people, including one of President Donald Trump.
By Nikas Safronov
The portraits are not on display at the NGMA. Instead, there are about 40 of his well-executed paintings. Each of them is painted in a classical style that cannot be described as adventurous. However, most of the paintings contain whimsical or Surrealist elements. Some of the works contain Indian subject matter. The paintings are displayed in a large room onto whose walls and ceilings video images are projected.
Although this is by no means one of the best exhibitions I have seen, it is interesting to see what is being produced, and approved of, in Russia, which has become culturally isolated from much of the world beyond its borders. In fact, this exhibition is part of what the Hindustan Times (30 December 2025) described as part: “… of a broader Indo-Russian cultural initiative, Dream Vision positions art as a form of cultural diplomacy…”
Today, 2 January 2026, we were discussing this exhibition with a friend, who knew of the initiative, and had recently attended an event that had been part if it: a ballet performed by dancers who had come to India from St Petersburg.
Although I have reservations about the profundity of the artworks we saw at the NGMA, I was pleased to have seen the show and to have viewed what kind of work is being produced by an artist who is currently highly regarded in Russia.
THE BHARATIYA SANSKRUTI DARSHAN Museum in Bhuj houses a fascinating collection of artefacts which were collected from all over Kutch by Ramsinhji Kanji Rathod (1907-1997). Amongst these is an amazing collection of various kinds of textiles collected from all over the former Kingdom of Kutch (now part of Gujarat). Rathod also collected clay articles from the Harrapan site of Dholavira long before archaeologists began to take an interest in the area. I could continue by listing many other fascinating exhibits in the museum, but I will concentrate on three of them.
The three exhibits are all paintings by two Kutchi artists from Bhuj: Vadha and Lalmahad Juma. They were painted by 1884 at the latest. One of their creations hangs in Kedlestone Hall in Derbyshire, home of the Curzon family.
Sidi dancers
One of these three paintings in the museum depicts a folk dance being performed by Kutchi Sidis (people of Black African heritage living in India). The other two paintings depict Kutchi weddings.
What fascinated me was that these three paintings were exhibited outside Kutch: in Pune in 1888, and in London’s Wembley in 1925. They travelled over 5000 miles to Wembley to be exhibited in the British Empire Exhibition, which was held in the Empire Stadium between 9 May and 31 October 1925. The stadium later became England’s national football stadium. It was demolished by 2003, and replaced by a new one.
Interesting as this is, there are plenty of other exhibits to stimulate the admiration visitors to this wonderful museum ably curated by our friend Neeta Joshi. Undeservedly, this museum, which rivals many others I have seen in India, is not as well-known as other sights in Bhuj.
KRISHEN KHANNA CELEBRATED his one hundredth birthday in July 2025. The NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art) in Bombay is currently holding a superb exhibition showcasing his paintings. The show is beautifully displayed and the artworks are skilfully illuminated.
Khanna was born in Lyallpur, now in Pakistan. After the Partition of India in 1947, he worked as an official in Grindlays Bank in Bombay. However, before Partition, he had already begun painting. The bank job was just to help keep him and his family going after they had left/fled what became the Pakistani part of Punjab.
Soon after arriving in India, Khanna began associating with members of Bombay’s Progressive Art Group that included notable creators such as FN Souza and MF Hussain. Thereafter, his painting career took off, and his reputation soared.
The exhibition at the NGMA surveys Khanna’s extraordinary range of paintings. Their subject matter ranges from political to historical to religious … and much more. The show, which demonstrates the artist’s amazing versatility and great artistic skill, continues until 12 December 2025, and should not be missed if you are in Bombay.
WE ATTENDED AN exhibition of paintings on cloth textiles by Anju Dodiya, who was born in Bombay in 1964. She studied at the Sir JJ School of Art. We were fortunate to have met her at Chemould Galleryin Bombay’s Prescott Street, where her paintings are being exhibited.
The exhibition is called “The Geometry of Ash”. The fabrics on which she has painted beautiful, slightly mysterious images come from all over the world. Some from West Africa, and one from London (it is a slightly stained British Museum tea towel).
According to the gallery’s handout: “Anju speaks of stillness not as passivity, but as resistance. In an age of urgency, of constant outrage and digital noise, her paintings compel us to pause. They demand attention, not compulsion …”
Whetether or not you feel this when you view the exhibition is irrelevant because the paintings are beautifully executed and visually compelling. I am pleased that we were braved Bombay’s high air temperature one afternoon to walk to the show.
THE ARTIST PETER DOIG was born in Edinburgh in 1959. He grew up in Trinidad and Canada. He moved to England, where he studied art at Saint Martins School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, both in London. Until 8 February 2026, there is a superb exhibition of his paintings being held at the Serpentine South Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Many of the works on show reflect the years (2002-2021) that Doig lived in Trinidad.
The exhibition is called “House of Music” because that is exactly what has been created in the gallery. Not only can Doig’s pictures be viewed, but also there is music to be heard. The curators have created a “multi-sensory environment”. Along with the paintings, there are some beautifully restored loudspeakers originally designed for use in cinemas and large auditoriums during the first half of the twentieth century and the 1950s. The gallery’s website noted:
“Spanning the last 25 years, the exhibition brings together the artist’s paintings with sound for the first time. At the core of the exhibition are two sets of rare, restored analogue speakers, originally designed for cinemas and large auditoriums in the early and mid-twentieth century. Music selected by the artist – from his vast archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes accumulated over decades – plays daily through a pair of original ‘high fidelity’ 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers. A rare Western Electric and Bell Labs sound system, produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s to meet the demands of the first ‘talking movies’, is installed in the central gallery.”
Doig’s beautifully executed, often colourful and quite delicate, paintings are the ‘stars’ of the show. Many of the 25 paintings depict life in Trinidad. Six of them include musicians and/or musical instruments. And Lions appear in many of the images. One of the paintings is Doig’s image of the large kind of loudspeaker that reminds one of the actual speakers on display in the exhibition.
Chairs are distributed randomly in two of the rooms of the gallery, and viewers are invited to sit down, contemplate the paintings, and enjoy the background music. On their own, the paintings would satisfy most people, but the careful use of background sound results in a show that should not be missed.
THE ARTIST ANSELM Kiefer is said to have remarked:
“I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist.”
By Nomoru Minata
For what we see when we regard a landscape is the result of millions of years of geological and meteorological evolution as well many millennia of interventions by biological phenomena including human activities: both constructive and destructive. As the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane wrote:
“We live on a restless crust of earth. Behind the façade of stability, everything is shifting, imperceptibly, but continuously.”
Artists have been creating images of landscape for many centuries. The earliest known depictions of landscape include Minoan frescoes created in about 1500 BC. The genre of European art called ‘landscape painting’ began in Holland in the seventeenth century. The website of the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey noted in connection with this:
“17th-century Dutch artists of the Golden Age, during which the genre ‘landschap’ was first named, turned away from religious subjects as an expression of Protestant values …”
Until 7 September 2025, the White Cube at Bermondsey is hosting an exhibition called “Alien Shores”. Curated by Susanna Greeves, this show:
“… explores landscape as a place of memory, imagination, yearning and belonging. Through painting, video, photography and sculpture, the artists included offer speculative, symbolic or surreal depictions of emotional terrain and voyages of the imagination, visions of the distant past or possible futures.”
The exhibition includes works by 37 artists, all of whom worked in the twentieth and/or twenty-first centuries. It is a display of modern and contemporary works of art that either depict landscapes or try to evoke thoughts of landscapes. The works are distributed amongst three rooms. In the first two rooms there are videos and kinetic sculptures as well as paintings. A video by Noémie Goudal is particularly fascinating and dramatic. The third and largest room contains a mixed bag of paintings and a sculpture by Noguchi. My enjoyment of the paintings in this room was not 100%. Some of the paintings looked like wall space fillers rather than great works of art. However, it his is not a room to be missed because it contains three outstanding landscapes by Anselm Kiefer. Seeing these in the company of many of the others served to emphasize (to me) what a great contemporary artist he is. Other ‘stars’ in this room were paintings by Minoru Nomata, Georgia O’Keeffe and Marina Rheingantz. A three-dimensional screen depicting a leafless forest by Eva Jospin in the long corridor of the White Cube also impressed me.
Although I wondered why a few of the artworks were included in the show, the Alien Shores exhibition has much to recommend it. It was fascinating to see how in a time frame of well under 100 years, artists have been tackling their various portrayals of landscape, and the interesting varieties of ways they have done it.
THERE IS A SUPERB collection of modern art from south Asia, which is being exhibited at Phillips auction house in London’s Berkely Square until 31 July 2025. Amongst the artworks on display are several paintings by the late Maqbool Fida Husain. As you can read in the following excerpt from my book about the first journey I made to Gujarat in western India in 2018, the Husain was keen on the area. We were in Ahmedabad when we stumbled across a restaurant called Lucky.
Now read on …
“We ate lunch at Lucky, an unusual restaurant near our hotel. This vegetarian eatery is divided into two sections: one serving sandwiches and Punjabi-style dishes, the other serving mainly south Indian dishes. In one of them, we noticed a framed painting by the famous Indian painter MF Husain (1915-2011), who was born in a Bohri Muslim family in Maharastra. He often travelled to Gujarat to paint. The picture in Lucky, and the place is truly lucky to have it, is a gift which the artist presented in 2004. This was the second original work by Hussain that we had seen in a restaurant. Earlier, we had seen a sketch by him in Bombay’s Noor Mohammadi Hotel, which serves Bohri dishes. When Hussain’s art works began to offend the extremist nationalist sentiments of some Hindus in India and they threatened his life, he felt forced to exile himself. He lived the last few years of his life in the Gulf States and the UK.
The curious thing about Lucky is not the MF Hussain painting, but its location in a disused Muslim cemetery. Its chairs and tables are placed between unmarked Muslim gravestones, painted green and surrounded by low metal railings painted white. The manager thought that these graves were over 300 years old. In addition to the graves, the thick trunk of a tree grows through the middle of the restaurant. The food and service are both good in this busy but peculiar place.”
SHYAMA GOLDEN WAS born in Texas (USA) in 1983. She is an artist of Sri Lankan heritage, who works in Los Angeles (USA). After qualifying to become a designer and illustrator, she took up full-time painting in 2020. Until 1 July 2025, there is an exhibition of her work at the PM/AM Gallery in London’s Eastcastle Street.
The exhibition includes a short film that Shyama created (with Paul Trillo), which is related to two of the paintings on show. It is a successful attempt to bring ‘to life’ or animate the scenes shown in the paintings. The artist is planning to make other films based on the other paintings in the show. The paintings have a dreamlike quality and most of them include details (for example parrots, exotic plants and jackfruits) that allude to the artist’s Sri Lankan heritage. With one exception, the paintings include blue masks such as are used in traditional Sri Lankan theatrical productions. In most of these paintings, the human figures are shown wearing these masks. The exhibition also includes four blue masks that Shyam has created.
Of the kind of work being shown in the gallery, the artist wrote in her website:
“… my current works populate a parallel dimension with a cast of characters which include vine-covered trees suggestive of human archetypes, Sri Lankan devil dancers dressed as Yakkas who take part in exorcist rituals, and self portraiture. The work is intended to appear theatrical, reflecting on an awareness of the social performance necessitated by our relationships with each other and the drama of everyday life.”
I enjoyed the exhibition because of the paintings’ eerily exotic, surrealist subject matter, depicted in interesting settings. It is remarkable to consider that these intriguing, competent works have been created by someone who has not had formal training in oil painting.
DAVID SALLE WAS born in 1952 in Oklahoma (USA). Between 1970 and 1975, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts. A painter, he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. There is an exhibition of his strange, colourful paintings at the Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in London’s Dover Street until 8 June 2025.
The paintings on display are strange compositions in which everything seems to be in the wrong place, perspective is confused, and the laws of gravity seem to have been forgotten. Yet the objects and people in the paintings have been depicted in a straightforward way, without distortion or abstraction. What was going on in the artist’s mind?
Salle, an innovative artist interested in developing new techniques, has employed artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to help him compose these images. Let me explain. Between 1999 and 2001, Salle produced a series of paintings inspired by a nineteenth century opera backdrop. He scanned these images into a machine with AI capabilities, and then, without providing any text prompts or instructions, he got the machine to use its AI to warp the scenes on his paintings to create new images that contain and reconfigure all the elements in his original pictures. In this way, he obtained new compositions, on which he has based his new paintings – those on display at Thaddeus Ropac. Regarding Salle’s innovation, the gallery’s press release noted:
“Painting is a technology in its own right, one that, as the history of art attests, has advanced over millennia through relentless modification and reinvention. For Salle, it is incumbent on the artist to make use of the tools available in their time, whether egg tempera, oil paint or photography. AI is useful ‘since it doesn’t know what it’s doing,’ he says. ‘It can violate all the rules of depiction without a pang of conscience.’ Like the human eye, it rapidly scans, processes and distils an endless stream of visual information … Avoiding the pitfalls of ‘generic’ digital imagery, the result is a highly concentrated visual vocabulary, which is enriched and intensified by further layers of overpainting. In concert with the reverberations of his past pictorial invention, Salle stages what curator Nancy Spector describes as a ‘duet for one’.”
This exhibition show how AI can be used intelligently and imaginatively by those working in the arts. Even if one had no inkling that Salle had created the paintings with the help of AI, what can be seen of his work at Thaddeus Ropac is both attractive and intriguing.
yamey 