A show featuring works by two artists opens itself up to many assumed interpretations. Viewers start looking for similarities in styles, in strokes, in themes, in every which way, just to understand why the works of the two have been put together.
They will find none of that in this exhibition that brings on the same platform, works by the renowned artist Anupam Sud, and Harshdeep Kaur, who shares a special relationship with the former. Because, it is not a show of similar ideas but of similar people, who are tied to each other by their shared passion for the arts, despite being separated by generations.
Harshdeep Kaur passed through the same corridors of College of Art, Delhi, as Anupam Sud, but in a different era. Sud, born in 1944, studied at the College of Art, from where she graduated in the 1960s. After a stint studying printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Arts, London, in the early 1970s, she returned to teach at her alma mater, 1977-2003. It was at the end of Sud's teaching career that Harshdeep Kaur-born 1981-graduated from the same College of Art, Delhi, earning a BFA degree in 2003.
But that is not the reason why this exhibition assumes importance. It is an exploration of the various intangible processes that work between a senior artist, who assumes the role of a teacher inadvertently, and a junior artist, who turns a learner unwittingly, both seamlessly giving and receiving creative inputs without shouting about it from the rooftops.
When such synergy exists between two creative individuals, each of their practice evolves into newer directions. It is more pronounced in the one who has a lot more to absorb by way of experience than the other.
It would be difficult for Anupam Sud to point out what she has actually taught Harshdeep Kaur, just as it would be difficult for the latter to pinpoint what exactly she has learnt from the former. But there are things that are incorporeal, impalpable, yet leave us different-often better-than before.
This joint show was planned a few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lockdown forced Sud to start painting with watercolours, while Kaur was mounting her first major solo at Arpana Art Gallery in New Delhi in 2020. Curated by Dr Seema Bawa, it was titled, 'Engaging with the Ultimate', and featured a range of works- landscapes, portraits, allegorical works drawn from the teachings of Sikhism-in an equally diverse range of mediums. A work from that collection which stood out was Kaur's 2019 portrait of Anupam Sud, in watercolour on archival paper, 5.5 x 4.0 in. Kaur was quite apprehensive of making that portrait but when Sud saw it, she liked it. It was not just a validation of Kaur's skills but also an affirmation of the synergy that flows uninterrupted between the two artists.
Having watched them in informal conversations over a few sessions, I'm sure that this exhibition too will reveal the synergy that informs their personal and professional relationship.
Archana Khare-Ghose
Critic and Author
New Delhi-based Senior Arts Journalist