At the end of its time

An email on the rainy afternoon of July 13 from Gallery Maskara, announcing its death knell, with Time as its last show, was saddening. But it was the content that proved particularly poignant: owner and curator Abhay Maskara's explaining how the sudden demise of his father from pancreatic cancer on June 14, within 12 days of diagnosis, led to this epiphanous decision to fulfil pending aspirations. Before his time also ran out.

"Seeing someone you love for the last 47 years fade away... We assume we have time. But we only have visibility of one thing: every breath in, we're alive, every breath out, we're no longer alive. I don't see myself doing what I did at 37, at 57. ," shares the grieving son, casting an occasional glance at his late father's portrait at the modest reception. "We've had 45 shows, each dramatically different. And that's enough."

Time, the gallerist adds, was not pieced together on mere tokenism – asking one work from every artist who showed here or call for new creations to be built from scratch. It was more to do with a specific exhibit at a past show or studio visit being embedded in his memory.

Three of the six exhibits involve naked human figures — in the case of Max Streicher's Quartet in a Box and Balancing Act, these are lifestyle dolls, suspended and lying down, that inflate and deflate to mark the precariousness of life; in Parag Sonarghare's Untitled it's a seated man showing signs of ageing and in T Venkanna's Same, Same, two self-portraits looking at the viewer cheekily in the eye, questioning ego and alter ego or the positive and negative.

Other works: Prashant Pandey's Peace is a flattened disc, fragmented to represent the universe damaged by war, Narendra Yadav's My Phantom Mother, which has a Mother Mary statue in a shadow play that highlight dualities within oneself, and Meenakshi Sengupta's Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and Night is still Young, which frames human hair and raises questions about beauty.

The timing

Maskara says he wanted to close the gallery back in 2010. Sporadic audiences, reliance on western patronage, entire shows going unsold… the reasons that prevented him were many. "We felt if Bombay doesn't want to support us, we don't need to exist. If not for the emotional and financial support of my father, there was no way to run the show without compromising on its integrity. He didn't understand contemporary art, but knew the difference it made to the artists. He knew my idealistic ways very well. If nobody believes in you, but your father does, it just gives you an extra sense of 'I can do it'."

Is it a lack of finance that has led to this abrupt end? A combination of his father's death and the absence of a robust eco-system, he confesses. "The shows are free to the public, but where is the public? I won't cater to an audience just so we can keep the lights on for a few more months."

Maskara's first brush with contemporary art was when he was 12 and found his father's collection of books on art. "My dad would say: read any book, travel to any place, for everything else, you have to ask."

His teen years involved soaking in museums and art galleries on his travels abroad, especially New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Chicago's Art Institute, that perhaps, helped develop a curator's eye and intuition. By 24, Maskara was collecting art. While working at Microsoft in the US, he lapped up the huge collection of modern and contemporary art on display in its 50 buildings. So assuming a curatorial role with no formal art education was never a handicap. "I come with many hats — collector, writer, student."

The art experience

He cites the Kochi Biennales — despite its teething troubles — as an eye-opener of what contemporary art can be. "It shows what can happen when you put aesthetics before everything else... especially redoing those pepper godowns locked up for ages…" Sounds similar to his 2006 chancing upon the once derelict cotton warehouse that became Gallery Maskara, after screening about 80 spaces. A far cry from the white cube space he dislikes.

"Shut for 30 years, it had no flooring, water, sewage or electricity. The roof was blown away in parts and walls sunken in eight-10 inches. The moment I saw it, I knew this would be it."

The 40-foot vertical vacuum inside led him to curate larger-than-life artworks to give the experience of being engulfed or immersed. Maskara says he enjoyed discovering unfamiliar names and impressing collectors with their unusual aesthetics. "Max Streicher, Shine Sivan, T Venkanna, Prashant Pandey, Priyanka Choudhary… all had their first shows here and now have an international collector base."

He's turned away artists looking for one-off shows, but okayed an Anant Joshi solo, Jitish Kallat's large sculptural works and a Riyas Komu exhibit which required a 30-foot wall installed at the centre, because they fit into the 'Maskara language'.

It was at the gallery that Maskara found love. He first met anthropologist Sonia Nazareth at the gallery and married her six years later in April 2015 on Narendra Yadav's My Lunatic Instinct, an art installation that involved beaming the live feed of the moon onto the gallery floor made to appear convex as if walking on the moon. All good things come to an end, and Maskara now wants to get away from the city and closer to nature. But he's keeping every avenue open. "I'm open to curate, write and advice." He is vague about the gallery's future but hopes it fashions into an art studio or a project space. "We are providing financial incentives to ensure that."