Some thoughts for the mind and soul

Team L&M

I Sculpt at the sprawling Gandhi Plaza, India International Centre (IIC) is a virtual feast to eyes. The life-size sculptures and installations placed strategically at vantage locations are awe-inspiring, to say the least. While each is markedly different from the other, together they blend so seamlessly with each other that removing just one would make it incomplete. The natural surroundings with full-grown kadamb and raktchandan trees forming the background and small bushes at the bottom of the sculptures and installations play a perfect host to these magnificent works of art.

The exhibition, divided into contemporary installations and sculptures, is curated by Uma Nair and presented by Neeraj Gupta of Delhi. Notable among the pieces are Neeraj Gupta’s Divine Love, Arun Pandit’s Mask Seller and Error 404, Sanjay Bhattacharyya’s Krishna, Vineet Kacker’s Buddhist Pillar, Tapas Biswas’ Innocence, Mukesh Sharma’s magnificent Shesh Nag, Atul Sinha’s Praise the Lord, Simran Lamba’s Radha Krishna-Shunya, Madhab Das’ An Inconvenient Truth and Puneet Kaushik’s spiral of a Metaphoric Spider.

The Sesh Nag immediately catches one’s attention not due to its huge size and placement at the beginning but also because this beautiful art work is created out of waste materials. The head is made of keys of computer board and its other electronic parts like cables and RAMs while the rest of the body is made of styrofoam packaging material. But all this you can notice only on a closer scrutiny, from a far it appears to be made of narrow pipes.

Neeraj Gupta’s Divine Love shows the warmth of human relationships through its perfectly choreographed intricate figures of men and women. An Inconvenient Truth by Madhab Das jolts you from your reverie and forces you to think about the harm man has done to the nature. It shows a deer with iron, bricks and tall iron rods in its belly, a perfect way to show the eating up animals’ habitat by human greed.

The tall and stately 12-ft bronze Krishna with Flute by Sanjay Bhattacharyya occupies the pride of place while Mask Seller by Arun Pandit shows the many faces of human predicament. The Innocence 3 by Tapas Biswas shows the face of a small girl child amid a network of leaves and twigs made of metal.

The show is on at the IIC till December 21 and is a must visit for the lovers of art.