Pioneers Of Visual Arts- Shirin Neshat And Amrita Sher-Gil
Shirin Neshat:
Shirin Neshat is a contemporary Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film, which examines the relationship between women and Islam's religious and cultural value systems (such as her 1999 film Rapture). She said she wants to “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level" from the viewers of her work. She was born on March 26, 1957 in Qazin, Iran. She studied in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley before she left for the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Her film narratives appear to be more abstract, concentrating on issues of gender, culture, and culture, even though her early photographs were openly political.
Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women of Allah’ series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.
Her first solo exhibition was at Franklin Furnace in 1993. Since then Neshat has been featured in solo exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries in 2000; Walker Art Center in 2002; Hamburger Bahnhof in 2005; Stedelijk Museum 2006; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum in 2013; and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2014.
RECOGNITION: :
From 1990 onward Neshet went on to receive numerous grants, fellowships, and prizes, across New York, Madrid, Scotland, Germany, and Japan. In 2003, she was the Honoree at The First Annual Risk Takers in the Arts. In 1996, she was the recipient of a New York Foundation for Arts Photography Fellowship and also the recipient of a grant from Tiffany Foundation. In 2005, she received an Award, Hiroshima City Museum of Art, Hiroshima, Japan. In 1999, Shirin was awarded her First International Prize, 48th Venice Biennale. In 2008, she received the Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship in New York. In 2009, Shirin won the Silver Lion Award during the 66th Venice Film Festival and The Cinema for Peace Special Award in Germany.
ARTWORK:
Her video installation trilogy comprising Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000) portray abstract oppositions based around gender and society. Neshat’s video works Soliloquy (1999), Possessed (2001), Pulse (2001), and Tooba (2002) explore female identity in the context of Islamic culture, law, and religion.
Amrita Sher-Gil:
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 30 January 1913. Born a Hungarian mother and a Sikh landowner father, she had an early training at the L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. She was declared "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and is truly a pioneer of modern Indian art. For her oil painting titled, ‘Young Girls’ in 1932, she first received global attention at the age of 19. Sher-Gil is considered an important Indian painter of the 20th century, whose reputation stands at par with that of the Bengal Renaissance pioneers.
Sher-Gil's paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today. The poverty, sorrow, and monumental intensity, of the people she saw around her, appear to be evoked in her early paintings. In 1937, one of her paintings, ‘Group of Young Girls’, a stellar work in earthy colors illustrating three young girls waiting thoughtfully for the future that lay in store for them, received a Gold Medal from the Bombay Art Society. Bulk Raj Anand observes, “She had seen the Indian people from the point of view of the outsider, who wanted to become an insider. And she had accepted them in all their moods, because in the amorphous work of the bazaars, in the villages of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, in Simla, they were a colorful crowd, who excited her love of colour. Yet she perceived, even when they were in a fair, each one of them was alone. Especially the women who were segregated both in rich and poor households.”
From Sayed Haider Raza to Arpita Singh, SherGil's art has inspired generations of Indian artists, and her representation of the plight of women has made her art a beacon for women in India and abroad. Her works have been declared as National Art Treasures by the Government of India, and most of them are housed in the New Delhi National Gallery of Modern Art. Some of her paintings still hang at the Museum of Lahore today.
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