Complimenting Contrasts – an exhibition by students of Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath 2015 – 2019
Opens April 30, 2019 @ 6PM
On display till May 3, 2019
Curator – Nandita Verma
Co-ordinator – Sagar Shastri
The show ‘Complimenting Contrasts’ by the students of Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath focuses on the threshold faced by art students. When studying art, unlike other fields, students tend to get an exposure to professionalism during the course of their education and many art students are already existing artists when they join an art school. ‘Drushyotsava 2019’ (Student’s Final Show) held in the month of March intrigued the visitors in an enthralling way. It was a popular opinion that the show was profoundly professional in terms of the artworks on display and evidently, was missing the element of studentship and playfulness. It is fairly a thought provoking opinion as to what exactly is the difference between an art student and an art professional. The four years of experience in an art college teaches the students that during the process of learning, quantity and consistency are more important than quality. Arguably the only difference between works of a student and works of a professional are those very things. However it is popularly assumed that the difference is based on the choice of subject, media and the scale of the works.
Learning is a never ending process, that way we’re all students and always will be in one way or another. This show can be conceived as a response to the opinions raised by the final show but demonstrates something completely contradicting yet complimenting. While the final show, being a “student platform” mostly consisted of works that focused on psychological and sicio-political themes, this show focuses on extremely personal themes within a platform that can be perceived as professional. Hopefully it will succeed in testifying that playfulness is something within students and can be switched on and off depending on their intentions and choices. The show does not aim to provide any answers, rather it raises questions regarding the norms of art education and how the society perceives the works of a ‘student’.
