Comment

I have long been fascinated by the secrets aspects of a city — hidden to an alien or untutored eye. There is always much more than meets the eye. And only tenacious pursuit and the right kind of friends will reveal it to you.

In Paris, for example, you can find the most extraordinary gardens on its rooftops or deep in the recesses of buildings with unimposing facades. Mundane doors often open into secret worlds.

While the havelis perched like creaking sentinels on the edge of small, meandering galis in the heart of old Delhi entice with their air of mystery and ancient intrigues, New Delhi is more in-your-face. We Delhiwallahs tend to wear what we have on our person or in our homes. Exteriors are usually in sync with interiors: what you see is what you get.
Mumbai is more circumspect, Kolkata even more so. You can’t judge a building by its cover, so to speak.

There have always been fascinating worlds to be found behind crumbling, monsoon-withered façades in the city by the Arabian Sea. Bombay (the old name sits better in this sentence) has always been a mosaic of old cosmopolitanisms — whiffs of distant ‘elsewheres’ that made this city such an interesting crossroads of cultures.

It’s happening once again — in the field of art. Amchi Mumbai has begun to get a bit of a cosmopolitan underbelly, much of it located in the bylanes of Colaba Causeway. You wouldn’t know it from the edifices of about half a dozen new galleries that have been popping up quietly here, some in the strangest of places: erstwhile mills, warehouses and godowns. Once again, misleading facades all.

Not only are some of the newer galleries exhibiting the work of foreigners, but some buyers are foreigners — not just the swelling brood of expats, but visitors from overseas. Take one of the newest kids on the block, The Warehouse, opened this year by Abhay Maskara (former marketing professional withMicrosoft in Seattle) in a tiny lane off Colaba Causeway.

Formerly a place to store cotton bales, this gallery with a soaring ceiling and Zen-like simplicity is currently showing the inflatable and rather moving sculptures of Max Streicher, a well-respected Canadian artist who specializes in kinetic inflatable forms.

Recently a gallerist from Europe bought two of the works. Here are foreigners buying works of other foreigners in Mumbai. There is an even more interesting twist to this tale. Maskara came across Streicher while visiting Brazil and invited him to work and show here. The refreshingly outspoken collector-gallerist plans to show works of noted artists from overseas: next on the agenda are Belgian and South American artists.

I came across Maskara at a Sunday brunch opening of a new show at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke, behind the Taj Hotel. It was of German artist Matthias Mansen’s intriguing woodcuts. The world of contemporary art is going flat here, to quote Thomas Friedman.

Last year this gallery showed the surreal drawings of the late Nikki de Sainte Phalle (part of the wider circle of Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali). The show in Mumbai was on around the same time as an exhibition of her work at MoMA (Musuem of Modern Art) in New York.

What makes Mumbai more exciting these days is the kaleidoscopic nature of its art landscape. The shift from the moderns, progressives and signature heavies to art that does not need walls is this outcrop of a new breed of galleries that can provide alternative spaces for New Media Art. Sree Goswami’s two year old Project 88, a ‘transformed’ mill in Colaba whose exposed beams and columns arereminders of its industrial past, or Amit Judge’s new Bodhi Space, carved out of a godown, with its iron doors recalling its previous incarnation, do just that.

The newest ‘space’ is The Viewing Gallery in Colaba. The lawyer-owners may not have decided what they will do with this marvelous space with exposed pipes and a sleek factory-feel, but artists in search of a space can rejoice.
Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com