Questioning Legacies

From mythical to the bold, Gogi Saroj Pal celebrates different faces of a woman in a retrospective .

The nondescript lanes of East of Kailash lead into the home of Gogi Saroj Pal and her husband Ved Nayar. The greens step into the basement, an open studio for young artists. This is where the couple allows students to work and practice their art. “Young artists often find it difficult to afford a studio,” says Pal. She occupies a studio on the ground floor, where students can drop-in for advice and discussions as well. In the ’70s, the duo was famous for drawing room exhibitions at their Tara Apartment home. “There were hardly any galleries back then,” says Pal, looking at an unfinished canvas with a women protagonist that hangs on her easel.

Women have been her leitmotif for decades now — as Kinnari, the mythical bird-woman or Kamdhenu, the wish-fulfilling cow. The voluptuous bodies have been nude — sensual and brazen. At her retrospective at Pathways Art Gallery, their different faces painted over four decades come together, from gouache to oil and ceramic.

Her second retrospective in three years is sourced from her private collection. The oldest is a pair of profiles, watercolours painted with woman heads from 1973. If a 1985 work has a curvaceous beauty in a cloudy surrounding, the winged Kinnari flies from a 1989 gouache into a starry 2012 work. The satirical Nati Binodini appears traditional, and in All These Flowers Are For You she is in the verandah with flowers in the backdrop. “I’m fascinated by social links and their mythological values. My work is an investigation into whether we are carrying dead weight of folklore and beliefs. We should not just carry on with legacies, but question them,” says the 69-year-old.

The exhibition at Pathways Art Gallery, Pathways School, Gurgaon, is on from November 16 to 26.

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