Until the 31st of December, the work of seven artists from India will be on display at the Art Hub gallery in Mussafah.
Each month, this Abu Dhabi-based art association invites to the capital visual artists from around the world to take part in a residency programme that sees them creating exclusive pieces to be displayed in their headquarters.
Among the artists taking part in this vibrant cross-cultural artistic pollination this month is Chennai-based painter K.R. Santhanakrishnan.
A fine-art postgraduate, he has been working on his project ‘The Doors’ for the past 18 years.
“I know and believe that a door speaks volumes,” he told Abu Dhabi Week. “It can either be wide open inviting you in with warmth and happiness, or it can be closed, hiding a million secrets. A door says words that men cannot say.”
Identifying himself as ‘a typical South Indian artist from Tamilnadu’, Santhanakrishnan strongly believe in the conservation of his country’s culture.
“What speaks more about our heritage than the place we live in?” he explained. “Some of my doors open into an interior with tulsi tharas [a sacred stone platform on which a sacred plant is grown] in the inner courtyards, and some of my closed doors with a huge lock show faded house numbers and painted advertisements. Through this, I want to depict the lives of the people living behind these doors.”
“Most of my doors are not from urbanized cities but from the rural homes that I grew up watching every day,”
he adds.
“Today, I paint more wooden, soot-covered, kumkum [red] and turmeric markings-covered doors, because they fascinate me more than fancy stained glass doors,” he said. “I believe each door has a tale to narrate.”
Santhanakrishnan’s art – mostly acrylic on canvas and mixed media on wood – has been exhibited in Boston, London, Taiwan, Dubai, Mauritius, Singapore, Vietnam and India, and now he is creating in Abu Dhabi.
“I like the city, with its unique culture and heritage,” he said. “Some doors here in Abu Dhabi are very similar to the doors in the northern part of India. For Art Hub, I have done a painting based on this. I was also attracted by the colours of the UAE flag, so I painted a door based on it.”
Also featured in the India Art Month exhibition are artists Devi Seetharam, Jayanta Khan, Madhu Venugopalan, Mahmood Ahmad, Rahul and Rohan Raju.
The exhibition will open on 6th December at 7pm to an evening of celebrations organised in collaboration with the Embassy of India – featuring food tasting and a folk fusion dance performance by a 30-strong children group.
For more information contact Abu Dhabi Art Hub on: 02 551 5005
