Framing Flowers: See the spirit of Kenya unveiled through the works of artist Aparna Banerjee

According to Maddox, Banerjee “captures the long winding roads of the highway and the local market alive with the tourist hub-bub.”

Curated by Maddox, the exhibition will be held at the Museo Camera in Gurgaon and will be inaugurated by the Deputy High Commissioner of Kenya.

The exhibition will be held from May 5 to 7 this year; timing- 5pm to 7pm.

In her introduction to the artist, Maddox writes –

“An artist who works with painting in mixed media, sculpture, prints, as well as photography, Aparna began her journey in art when she was a young teenager of 17-years-old.

With an artistic bent of mind since her youth, she entered the creative field as a fashion designer in the earlier part of her career, however despite winning many awards in her design capacity, her calling as an artist got more serious and her artistic career emerged with the advent of the internet where she began sharing her work online, to a larger audience.

This attracted the interest of several viewers across the globe and it wasn't long before people offered to buy her artwork.

Encouraged by her father, Aparna began showcasing her artwork and her first important solo show was at a gallery called Eterne Art run by Sudhanshu.

Her first big show outside Delhi was held in Mumbai where she showed work alongside the moderns like M F Husain, Akbar Padamsee and V Nagdas at the Nehru Centre Art Gallery.

Interestingly, Aparna recently came upon the old catalogue of this exhibition at a second hand bookshop and the owner of the store gifted the catalogue once he realized that she was one of the artists in the show.

After that it has been a progressive journey where Aparna has shown in almost 40 exhibitions, both group and solo, in Austria and Iran, Dubai, Texas South Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Russian and most recently at Art Basel.

She has also held shows in New York at the NY Art Expo.

After her work was spotted by abstract painter Khurshid Alam Saleem (who is winner of Olympic Gold Medal for the Fine Arts in Beijing 2008) , she had a solo at the Asian American Cultural Center and things snowballed from there.

The exhibition was a sold out show and this really gave Aparna the confidence that she needed.”

Talking about Banerjee’s body of works, Maddox says –

“Aparna's work is by and large figurative although it is not Realist, but Expressionist in its rendering, capturing the emotion and energy of her subject, rather than a study of just their physiognomy.

There is a quality in the line colour and texture of the forms that transports the viewer into a heightened awareness of the emotions which is often one of calm beauty, that is effeminate and ephemeral …The blooming flowers, wisps of colour and texture, the waters around the lily pond, the nubile form of a woman, are moments of beauty that may stay in one's memory even if the lowers themselves fade or the beauty matures.

The mood is often light and playful but it may also be a darker more serious emotion that she taps into, especially with the expression caught in her subjects’ eyes.”

In ‘Framing Flowers’, according to Maddox, Banerjee’s paintings and photographs “come together with the wildlife taking on a shimmering appearance as if viewed through the layers of atmospheric stratums, so as to give them a magical appearance.”

Says Maddox –

“In her photography, Aparna has recently travelled to Kenya where she has experimented working with the photographic surface in Photoshop, to lend the photographs a painterly quality.

As she captures a group of youngsters walking along the road, the artist blanks out the background giving it instead a layer of solid paint and bringing the subjects into sharp focus and lending it a highly painterly quality.

In another work foregrounds a mother with her two children seated on the front steps of their dwelling, Aparna has merged the features of the mother with that of the child with a movement blur while leaving the little daughter dressed in white in sharp focus to the side of the other two figures.

It makes for an interesting study of motherhood and how one often has to divide attention between children.

There are other instances where Aparna captures the movement of a skipping child being led by the hand of her parent, by blurring the surroundings in a rhythmic pattern.

In another work she captures a panoramic view of the market place with its variety of colours or she presents a purely photographic panorama of the rich countryside of Kenya.

Kenya is known as being one of the major exporters of flowers.

The Kenya flowers are sold in more than 60 countries.

It is estimated that in Kenya, over 500,000 people, including over 100,000 flower farm employees depend on the floriculture industry impacting over 2 million livelihoods.

Yet it has been critiqued globally for poor labour and environmental standards.

Aparna's imagery does capture this dichotomy but more through a poetic lens rather than a journalistic approach; for instance, the roses bleed their colour onto a grey backdrop.

Leaving one with many colours and imagery that morphs from the painterly to the photographic, Aparna creates a unique artistic language that brings to her and her viewers experience of Kenya, viewed through her very personal and highly expressionistic evocation.”

The exhibition will subsequently travel to Jaipur where it will be exhibited from May 12-17 at the ITC Rajputana.

Banerjee runs her own studio, the Art Lounge at Nirvana Courtyard in Gurgaon, which also doubles up as a gallery and an art school.