BySiddhi Jain

February 23, 2020 (IANSlife) A retrospective exhibition of Mehlli Gobhai (1931-2018), one of India’s most distinguished and pathbreaking abstractionists, will go on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai early March.

Supported by the Mumbai-based art gallery Chemould Prescott Road, the show titled ‘Don’t Ask Me About Colour’ or ‘Mujhse Rang Ki Baat Naa Karo’, is curated by Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania. It bears witness to nearly 70 years of Mehlli Gobhai’s art.

Educated in Mumbai, London and New York, Gobhai lived in New York from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Comprising nearly 200 exhibits, this exhibition includes his early, self-assured drawings from the late 1940s, made when he was a teenager, as well as the compelling paintings that he made in a continuous period of productivity from roughly 1985 to 2011.

 

 

This retrospective presents to the viewing public, for the first time, the extraordinary and remarkably fresh polychrome paintings that mark Gobhai’s transition from a figurative and representational style to abstraction. It includes the experimental paintings he made in casein, and using graphite and aluminium powder, during his New York days.

In his paintings, Gobhai combined a commitment to a precise, incised geometry with a delight in the sensuousness of textures suggestive of rockface or burnished leather. He regarded colour as a temptation best submerged in the palette of sepia, burnt umber, burnt sienna and charcoal grey that he favoured. 

The abstract artist to whom he was closest in spirit was Ad Reinhardt. His sources of inspiration also included patterned river stones, non-iconic wayside shrines, Chola bronzes, and the alchemical metaphors of transmutation, the gallery said.

Visitors will have the opportunity to see his masterly life studies, his work in dry pastels and his forays into print-making, and the children’s books that he wrote and illustrated, a number of them inspired by Indian folktales.

“The first time I met Mehlli Gobhai it was love at first sight. He was a stunner! I knew the charmer Mehlli before I knew the artist Mehlli. But once I began to know the artist, studio visits were frequent. Mehlli taught me how to look at abstraction just by they encounters I had with his paintings. 

When in his studio it was him and the work and he spoke about nothing else - going back to the painting, touching the surface, shifting the position of the thread that ran through it...undecided till he was decided. That was Mehlli, he was made of so much - precision yet undecided, questioning yet sure, obsessive yet submitting. He was all of this. His legacy lives through his work,” gallerist Shireen Gandhy told IANSlife.

‘Don’t Ask Me About Colour’ also develops a portrait of Gobhai as a participant in culture at large, as connoisseur, enthusiast, occasional writer, designer, and collector – aspects of his life that were invisible to his art-world viewers.

Gobhai was, for many years, an advertising professional. This show includes a section showcasing his work in advertising, as well as posters and brochures he designed for Ebrahim Alkazi’s Theatre Group.

The show contextualises Mehlli Gobhai’s art through a judicious selection of exhibits from his private collection, which embraced traditional objects of everyday life as well as craft in metal, wood and cloth, and works by young artists whose cause he championed.

It runs from March 7 to April 25, 2020.

 

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Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in