Sandhya Bordewekar
Gallery-hopping in Vadodara and Ahmedabad
‘Mandi’ in Hindi means ‘market’ and in Gujarati with a soft ‘d’, it could mean ‘recession’. Mandi is affected by Mandi but
in Ahmedabad and Baroda, galleries make all their best efforts to keep the show on. Sandhya Bordewekar does an exhaustive but comprehensive gallery hopping and tells us the following story. For a number of decades, Baroda seriously believed that it was the true ‘sanskarnagari’ in Gujarat, thumbing its nose at other cities in the state, especially Ahmedabad. But when on August 10, Bhupen Khakhar’s 10th death anniversary, Ahmedabad’s Archer Art Gallery organised
“Remembering Bhupen”, an exhibition of his artworks from private collections in Ahmedabad, thatwas inaugurated by Bhupen’s close friend, Dr. Sunil Kothari, along with Gulammohammad Sheikh reading from a personal memoir, Naushil Mehta reading from Bhupen’s unpublished writings,Atul Dodiya and Prabodh Parikh speaking on Bhupen, and Manoj Shah reading out a letter from Bhupen, and Baroda was deathly quiet, one could sense that something was quite, quite wrong.

Yes, Baroda has really lost its galleries. The oldest survivor is the Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, which is more of an academic rather than a commercial gallery space. Hitesh Rana’s Sarjan Art Gallery is another survivor, waking up every now and then, managing to keep its head above the water, not because of its current shows but because of art collections largely made in the pre-boom years. In its earlier days, Sarjan staged many good shows, some of them positively adventurous, but post-boom, Rana has been treading cautiously. In his most recent offering, “Mandi” (as in its
Gujarati meaning, ’recession’ not the Hindi ‘market’ though both are ironically related), he got almost every artist in Baroda and elsewhere to participate with small drawings/watercolours on paper, all priced at Rs. 10,000 and less (unframed). The show, which is still on, was an apparent success with brisk sales, and the news value of a Khakhar or a Subramanyan drawing at that rate grabbed media eye-balls too, making waves as far off as Delhi and Mumbai. But, the show itself was not edited at all, and resulted in a curious khichdi of mostly mediocre works that justified themselves because of the
low price.

The Red Earth Galleries space is without doubt the best space in town – large, air-conditioned and easy to access. Last month, it hosted a solo show of the Hyderabad-based D. L. N. Reddy, a strange hotch-potch of paintings of gods and goddesses, some prints and a bunch of sculptures that looked like totem poles. How the mighty have fallen! I mention this solo show because it is an apt metaphor for the way this gallery has gone about its business – simply inexplicable, completely unimaginative. Same is the case with the Aakruti Art Gallery – again a fair-sized space, air-conditioned and superbly positioned (a stone’s throw from the Faculty of Fine Arts and at a cusp between the old city and the The gallery space with a work of N N Rimzon at an exhibition in February 2013. A view of the Amdavad ni Gufa complex with the Herwitz Gallery on the left and the Husain-Doshi Gufa on the right, in Ahmedabad