Chivas x The Established’s guide to contemporary Indian artists

Celebrating World Art Day with artists who have shifted the status quo with their creative expressions

Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance man like no other. The Italian polymath was an artist, engineer, scientist, architect and theorist born in an age that went on to redefine technology and ideas not just in the West, but globally.

On 15 April, which marks Leonardo da Vinci’s 572nd birth anniversary this year, World Art Day is observed in commemoration of a mind that was far ahead of its times and continues to inspire creative and scientific inquisition across cultures. 

Celebrating this occasion, Chivas and The Established spotlight nine Indian artists, each demonstrating the transformative power of art through their unique practices. These artists reflect the diversity and future of art in India. Their work, characterised by ingenuity and a personal touch, resonates with Chivas's commitment to luxury, innovation, and supporting dynamic cultural expressions. The collaboration underscores the evolving landscape of Indian art, linking it seamlessly with the refined elegance that Chivas represents.

Art, after all, is a means to better understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

The Visual Storytellers

These artists are renowned for their ability to weave compelling narratives around the human condition. Their work uses visual storytelling to offer poignant insights into the personal and the societal.

Bharat Sikka

Bharat Sikka uses his historical lens to chart India’s societal transformation, captured through visual and material forms of contemporary art photography. Born in 1973, Sikka moved from India to New York to pursue photography and study at the Parsons School of Design. He received his Bachelor’s degree in photography in 2002, and has since gone on to headline several commercial projects, including those with popular international publications.

His signature cinematic style follows his career-long quest to find ways to depict India beyond the hackneyed documentarian style. Sikka seamlessly combines the personal and the political, as his images address themes around representation across caste, class and gender. The artist has chronicled Indian men, cityscapes, families, as well as the evolving urban youth. His approach to portraiture is less photographic and more artistic, setting him apart from his contemporaries.

Basist Kumar

There’s something lifelike to Basist Kumar’s idiom where he paints landscapes mostly bereft of humans, yet breathes motion into his hyper-real illustrations with detailing and atmospheric precision. After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Delhi University in 2007, Kumar pursued his Masters from Vishva-Bharati University, Santiniketan in 2009. A few years down the line, a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture allowed him to study at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China from 2013-15. 

Carrying a sense of grandeur, Kumar’s works are socio-ecological commentaries, like an ancient lore or myth of an epic scale unfurling. His paintings put to test the evolving relationship between cities and its people. His artistic technique has a striking verismo that adds an immersive dimension to his work that is almost transcendental to view.

Raqs Media Collective

The collective comprising Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta was formed in 1992. They don multiple hats—often at the same time—of artists, curators and even “philosophical agent provocateurs”.

The collective employs art and film, curates exhibitions, edits books, stages events, as well as works with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors to create seminal work for contemporary Indian culture. Their work stands at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry, where each project is an interrogation of larger societal themes. 

In 2000, the collective founded the Sarai Initiative, a platform that supports research projects on media urbanism, Cybermohalla, critiques of intellectual property, free software, art practice and the public realm, and language and the city.

Material Narratives: Explorations in Form and Sculptural Expression

These artists challenge conventional boundaries through their constantly evolving, innovative use of form, material and technology, adding a distinct sensorial dimension to their creative expression.

Thukral & Tagra 

The Gurugram-based duo of Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra—collectively known as Thukral & Tagra—have a two-decade-long illustrious practice that has seen experimentation with a gamut of media, ranging from paintings, sculptures and installations to archiving, new media and interactive games. 

That their practice is truly future-forward is evident from their engagement with both humanitarian and environmental concerns over the years. While their earlier works have dealt with the themes of migration, diaspora and the ramifications of consumer culture, their most recent preoccupations—as curators, too—attempt to address ecological issues through climate action and collaborations with policy research organisations, nudging viewers to reflect upon how their relationship with their natural surroundings in an ever-evolving digital age. 

Thukral & Tagra also practice what they disseminate; their studio in Gurugram is equipped with solar panels and a rainwater harvesting facility. An alluring 'pop' attribute is a running thread of their visual language, enabling viewers from varying demographics to interact with their work.

Martand Khosla 

Trained at the Architectural Association of London, Martand Khosla's artistic and sculptural practice runs in tandem with his architectural training. He interrogates urban continuity and its transformation, and shows a preoccupation with spaces in his work that spotlights an object’s inherent potentiality.

Khosla initially pursued art to study how employment in construction shapes identities and nostalgia. It informed his practice as both participant and observer, where he used tools of the State to impress on lives within traditional structures of power and loss. He pursued art independently in the quest to undertake larger interrogations of the way society interacted with its built environment. Every installation by Khosla urges its observer to confront a variety of questions about their situatedness in the spaces they occupy.

Asim Waqif 

For New Delhi-based Asim Waqif, an independent, dedicated practice was born out of his experiences as an art director for films followed by creating his own documentaries. Lying at the juncture of art, architecture and design, Waqif's large-scale, site-specific installations are a provocation to the grimness of our present-day realities.

With bold, contextual allusions to urban design and the built environment, as well as the harsh truths of systemic violence, the brute force of those in power, and the politics of occupying space in these fractured times, a clutch of his works have taken shape as public art installations in abandoned, decrepit spaces. 

Waqif's frequent use of found objects, UV prints and photography is a fresh yet impactful layer to his storytelling. His work is often composed through manual, meticulous processes, bringing together both traditional and evolving material forms.

Feminist Perspectives Across Eras

The work of these women artists from across decades employs distinct artistic idioms, presenting powerful feminist perspectives that challenge and redefine perceptions through their unique lenses.

Ayesha Singh

New Delhi-based sculptor Ayesha Singh considers the capital city as the recurring backdrop for most of her work. Her interest in the hybrid form of architecture—involving the traditional and the modern—examines the intersections of history, politics, gender and culture. Her monumental, outline-like metal sculptures seek inspiration from Mughal architecture, Indo-Saracenic designs and her Sikh heritage too. 

Singh's works invite the viewer to question the ideas of spatiality and identity in an age of constant destruction, erasure and reconstruction of our built environment through a personal as well as political lens. 

Apart from her artistic practice, Singh is the co-founder of Art Chain India, a peer-support initiative that aims to foster an environment of community and collaboration for visual artists in the Indian subcontinent.

Dhruvi Acharya

Dhruvi Acharya’s work is illustrative of the mind of an urban woman, as she copes with life amidst discord, violence and pollution. Her art employs a wry humour, and thoughts of her protagonists are laid bare as realities. Born in Mumbai, Acharya later moved to the US in the 1990s where she trained under Abstract Expressionist Grace Hartigan, Director of the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, from where she graduated with an MFA in 1998.

Unsurprisingly, Acharya’s protagonists are mostly female. They are based on her sketches and drawings, akin to an illustration of a stream of consciousness, where comic book-inspired empty thought and speech bubbles are used to convey undefinable emotions. Her works amalgamate curious influences from Amar Chitra Katha’s illustrated stories, and Mughal folios like the Padshahnama. She also draws inspiration from artists Juan Miro, Takashi Murakami, Lari Pittman, and Barry McGee. 

Vibha Galhotra 

Known for her large-scale, research-based multimedia works, New Delhi-based artist Vibha Galhotra's practice is embedded in tropes of consumerism, capitalism and the climate emergency, offering a renewed perspective on how these concerns have transformed our world and what it means for the human race. 

Through her strong conceptual vocabulary, Galhotra advocates an ungendered approach, despite her works being considered too "dark" or "manly" in the past. Social inequality and environmental degradation are concerns that manifest often in Galhotra's multidisciplinary practice. In the workshop of her studio, Galhotra works with women from the surrounding locality, enabling them to find their own sense of agency.

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