Overview

Late Assembly: Play in Two Acts brings together a range of material by Sankho Chaudhuri and DLN Reddy. The core of the exhibition focuses on late sculptures executed by both artists in the 1990s and 2000s. Here, play predominates as a method of sculptural thought. In the case of Sankho, as his son Itu recalls, the works emerged out of “experiments with sheet metal, kitchen foil and discarded toothpaste tubes and metal cutting shears.” In the words of Ira Chaudhuri, his wife and fellow artist, even into the 2000s Sankho continued “his old habit of getting fascinated with shapes made by biting into a piece of toast, chapatti, or the swirl of a papad that he is eating or the shapes he draws in his thali while eating.”

For DLN, the hardware shops of Hyderabad became a hunting ground for objects he would cut, crack, bend, and place together in strange, revelatory patterns which, he said, were intended “to give these works a new shape and a new life”. And the reason? He dedicated his sculptures “to the creator and my parents who have brought me to this part of the universe where beautiful life forms, surrounded by heavenly places, exist.”

United through sculpture and play, the two artists asked different questions of their chosen medium and found radically different answers. Sankho’s late works retain the compression, balance and formal intelligence of a modernist sculptural language. DLN’s assemblages, by contrast, draw on a post-modern language of fracture, excess and improvisation. Working with hardware, detritus and the found object, he moved away from the smoothness and universal claims of high modernism. Sankho was deeply committed to pedagogy and cultural policy; DLN often worked at odds with the mainstream art ecosystem and, to a large extent, removed himself from the market system, making a life for himself in Hyderabad, which lacked a vibrant commercial gallery scene.

Both artists knew of each other through their association with MS University, Baroda. Sankho was early faculty in the Sculpture Department, having moved from Santiniketan in the early 1950s. DLN was a student in the Printmaking Department from 1970 to 1971, precisely at the moment that the elder artist was in the process of moving to Delhi. Baroda is not presented here as a common stylistic source, but as an intellectual milieu through which both artists passed, and through which their work was later understood. The artist couple Gulammohamed Sheikh and Nilima Sheikh knew, and wrote about, both Sankho and DLN through this collective Baroda association. This exhibition owes a debt of gratitude to their texts, which have helped inform its curatorial thrust.

The role of sculpture within the canon of Indian art has long been contested, with primacy given to painting for much of the 20th century. Recently, an overdue reappraisal of the sculptural practices of artists such as Sankho and DLN has been underway. Late Assembly: Play in Two Acts proposes that these late works are not marginal codas to two careers, but important works through which to reconsider sculpture, play and material experiment in modern Indian art. In doing so, the exhibition offers audiences evidence of the breadth and range of sculpture made in India during the second half of the 20th century.