Live fossils lost species
Publisher: Mumbai ; ; 2015Edition: XIX; IV; October.Description: 85-89.Subject(s):
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Summary: Death wears a destinal profile, always. If it comes at a perversely punctual moment – just when the artist is about to behold her life’s work displayed in full maturity – it looks as though it is willed by the subject herself. Mrinalini/Dillu did not witness how her magnificence prevailed on the occasion of Transfigurations, her Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art.1 Even those who were not ‘believers’ gave her back the aura she presumed by the right of being the kind of artist figure she was. I am amplifying the tragic coincidence, but Dillu’s death does read like an oracular event; she now assumes, as she almost already did, a mythic cast. Amrita Sher-Gil died a week before her major exhibition (on December 6th, 1941). Ardently prepared, this show was to be her exalted come-back to cosmopolitan Lahore. She possibly died because an illness harboured in her body exploded from too much work. Amrita’s death is inscribed in the history of modern Indian art like a seal encoding an undeciphered cause – and unrealized potential. Dillu’s body was host to many health problems that she could in normal circumstances ‘manage’. It had worsened some weeks before the exhibition when she drove herself to the edge making the very last bronzes from the series she called Palm-Scapes. She was now testing her sculptor’s virtuosity: how large and broad is the stalk and leaf, how elaborate the wax-moulded object, how perfectly manipulated the poured metal during all-night firings, how decorative or disfiguring the scales, knobs and accretions on the raw bronze, how polished the surface. The last sculpture was made with all the bravado of her sculptural skills, its plant energy so fiercely sprung that it would serve as nature’s projectile if she had not as purposefully given the voluptuous palm frond a baroque curve, bringing its very tip to rest at the base line.
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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Articles Abstract Database
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School of Architecture Archieval Section | Not for loan | 2020-2021065 |
Death wears a destinal profile, always. If it comes at a perversely punctual moment – just when the artist is about to behold her life’s work displayed in full maturity – it looks as though it is willed by the subject herself. Mrinalini/Dillu did not witness how her magnificence prevailed on the occasion of Transfigurations, her Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art.1 Even those who were not ‘believers’ gave her back the aura she presumed by the right of being the kind of artist figure she was. I am amplifying the tragic coincidence, but Dillu’s death does read like an oracular event; she now assumes, as she almost already did, a mythic cast. Amrita Sher-Gil died a week before her major exhibition (on December 6th, 1941). Ardently prepared, this show was to be her exalted come-back to cosmopolitan Lahore. She possibly died because an illness harboured in her body exploded from too much work. Amrita’s death is inscribed in the history of modern Indian art like a seal encoding an undeciphered cause – and unrealized potential. Dillu’s body was host to many health problems that she could in normal circumstances ‘manage’. It had worsened some weeks before the exhibition when she drove herself to the edge making the very last bronzes from the series she called Palm-Scapes. She was now testing her sculptor’s virtuosity: how large and broad is the stalk and leaf, how elaborate the wax-moulded object, how perfectly manipulated the poured metal during all-night firings, how decorative or disfiguring the scales, knobs and accretions on the raw bronze, how polished the surface. The last sculpture was made with all the bravado of her sculptural skills, its plant energy so fiercely sprung that it would serve as nature’s projectile if she had not as purposefully given the voluptuous palm frond a baroque curve, bringing its very tip to rest at the base line.
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