The Romantic world of Venus, a solo exhibition by Raghu Vyas

 21st – 25th November 2013

Time         

 11 am to 7 pm

(Opening on 21st November at 7 pm)

Raghu Vyas has made a journey from the spiritual to the physical, from the forest with a cavorting peacock and the flute playing Krishna to the feminine charms of Venus/Padmini in his latest series of paintings. His work is located in the discourse of female beauty and physicality that seeks inspiration from a long visual tradition of sculpting/painting of the female form in voluptuous manner for male pleasure, starting from Greco-Roman era to Renaissance and Neo Classical European art. However, he retains the traditional Indian language of symbol, rendered in visual forms through these seemingly decorative details seen in Mathura, Gupta and Medieval sculpture and Indian miniature paintings replete as they are with various forms of female beauty. The leitmotif in Raghu Vyas works is that of Venus, the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, the goddess symbolizing beauty, love, femininity, sacred prostitution as well as fertility, plough lands and gardens; depicted in terms of the absolute norms of female beauty. He has an Indic equivalent in Ushas, who has a Sanskrit epithet of vanas-  a cognate referring to “loveliness,” “longing” or “desire.”