Anjolie Ela Menon

BORN
17 July 1940 Burnpur, Asansol

EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS
Bachelors in Literature, University of Delhi
1959-61 Atelier Fresque, Ecole Nationale des Beaux School of Fine Arts, Paris

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2017 Anjolie Ela Menon A Retrospective, Aicon Gallery, New York
2013 Recent Paintings, Grosvenor Vadehra, London
2013 Institute of Contemporary Indian Art (ICIA), Bombay
2010 Through the Patina, organized by Vadhera Art Gallery at Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
2007 Menongitis: three generations of art, Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi
2006 Celebration, ArtsIndia West Gallery, Palo Alto
2005 ArtsIndia West, Palo Alto
2004 ArtsIndia Gallery, New York
2003 Vadehra Art Gallery at Shridharani Gallery, Delhi
2002 Four Decades, Vadehra Art Gallery at National Art of Modern Art (NGMA), Bombay, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore
2000 Gods and Others, Apparao Galleries at Admit One Gallery, New York
1996 Vadhera Art Gallery, Hong Kong
1996 Mutations, organized by The Gallery, Madras, at Wallace Galleries, New York
1988 Retrospective 1958-88, organized by The Times of India, Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay
1976 Chemould Gallery, Bombay
1963 Alliance Francaise, Bombay
1959 Gallery 59, Bombay

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014 Immutable Gaze Part I Masterpieces of Modern and Pre-Modern Indian Art, Aicon Gallery, New York
2013 Remaking the Modern An Exhibition of Modern and Contemporary Art from India, Alon Zakaim Fine Art, Dover Street
2013 Glimpses of I Am the Tiger, Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), New Delhi
2013 Ideas of the Sublime, presented by Vadehra Art Gallery at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
2013 ROOM 13, Art Musings, Mumbai
2013 The Drawing Wall, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
2013 Color My World, presented by Mahua Art Gallery at Leela Galleria and Windsor Manor, Bengaluru
2013 Edge of Reason and Beyond, into pure creation, presented by Indian Art Circle at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
2012 Talking Heads, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi
2012 Iconic Processions, Aicon Gallery, New York
Gallery collection 2012, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
2012 Sacred and Temporal Women, Shrishti Art Gallery, Hyderabad
2012 Contemporary A selection of modern and contemporary art, presented by Sakshi Gallery at The Park, Chennai
2011 The Lost Sparrow, presented by Gallery Threshold at Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
2011 Masterclass, Dhoomimal Art Gallery, New Delhi
2010 Landscape of Figures - Part One, Aicon Gallery, New York
2009-10 Unclaimed Spaces, Gallery Threshold, New Delhi
2009.10 Masterclass, The Arts Trust, Mumbai
2009 Indian Art after Independence Selected works from the collections of Virginia and Ravi Akhoury and Shelley and Donald Rubin, Emile Lowe Gallery, Hempstead
2009 In Search of the Vernacular, Aicon Gallery, New York
2009 Kalpana Figurative Art in India, presented by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) at the Aicon Gallery, London, Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR)
2008 X to the rhythm of Jehangir, presented by Art Musings at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay
2008 Mapping Memories - 2, Painted Travelogues of Bali and Burma, Threshold Gallery, New Delhi
2007 Sitaaray - A galaxy of artists, Indian Habitat Centre, Delhi
2005 Drishti, Bodhi Art Gallery, New York
2004 Confluence 2004, ArtsIndia Gallery, New York
2004 Jiva- Life, contemporary Indian painting, Bodhi Art Gallery, New York. 2001 Saffronart and Apparao Galleries, Los Angeles. 2001 Saffronart, Hong Kong
2001 Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai, organized by Gallery Espace, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
2001 The Sacred Prism III, organized by Apparao Gallery, London, New York, San Francisco
1993 Reflections and Images, Vadehra Art Gallery at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
1986 Indian Women Artists, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai
1980 Exhibition in Washington D.C. and New York

PARTICIPATIONS
2015 Selections from Abby Gray and Indian Modernism from the New York University Art Collection, Gray Art Gallery, New York University, New York
2013 Palette Summer 2013, Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi
2012 Art for Humanity, Coomaraswamy Hall, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai
2011 Of Gods and Goddesses, Cinema, Cricket India's New Cultural Icons, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
2011 Resonance, Art Musings, Mumbai
2010 Art Celebrates 2010 Sports and the City, presented by Art Alive Gallery at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, coinciding with the Commonwealth Games
2010 Art Dubai 2010, presented by Aicon Gallery, New York
2010 Manifestations IV, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi
2010 ARCO 2010 Madrid, presented by Aicon Gallery, London
1980 Paris Biennale, Paris, France
1968, 71, 75 1st, 2nd and 3rd International Triennale, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi

HONORS AND AWARD
2000 Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award
2010 Limca Book of Records Commendation
2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Government of State of Delhi by the then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit
2018 Kalidas Samman Fellowship of Visual Arts from the Government of Madhya Pradesh
1959-61 French Government Scholarship for Higher Studies in Paris
1980-81 Invited to study by the Government of France, UK and USA

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Throughout her career as a painter, Anjolie Ela Menon has periodically rethought her role as an artist. Menon's early canvases exhibit the varied influences of Van Gogh, the Expressionists, Modigliani, Amrita Sher-Gil, and M. F. Husain. These paintings, which are primarily portraits, according to the artist, were dominated by flat areas of dense, bright color, with sharp contours that were painted with the vigor and boldness of extreme youth. Menon admits that her work has undergone enormous changes at each stage of her life and that as she has grown older, the narcissism of her early years has transformed into nostalgia.

Menon took up art while still in school, and by the time she was fifteen, she had already sold a couple of paintings. Finding J.J. In 1959, at the age of twenty, Menon left India to study art in Europe on a scholarship from the French government. There, she was influenced by her exposure to the techniques of medieval Christian artists. While at the Ecole National des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she began experimenting with a muted palette of translucent colors, which she created by repeatedly applying oil paint over thin glazes. Painting on pressed boards, Ella Menon enhanced the finely textured surface of her paintings by burnishing the finished work with a soft, dry brush, creating a sheen reminiscent of medieval icons. Menon used features of early Christian art, including frontal perspective, the tilted head, and the slight elongation of the body, but took the female nude as a frequent subject. The result is a dynamic relationship between the erotic and the melancholy. Menon has developed this iconography of distance and loss in his later works through his thematic depiction of black crows, empty chairs, windows, and hidden figures.

It is a challenge to categorize Menon's work, not only because she has been painting for a long time, but also because of the extreme changes her work has constantly undergone. She notes that dissatisfaction is the source of growth, encouraging artists to abandon familiar (and often acclaimed) grounds in search of new territories. The work she has produced is a testament to her disdain for categorization. Menon is more than happy not to fit into a single category and be considered a nonconformist who finds self-expression in language out of context with the time and place she lives in. She says I am not a didactic or narrative painter. I hardly care about events, though I like to expose my people; I like to strip them a little more than is decent, sometimes opening a chest to reveal the heart that beats within. Of course, many have identified with the women I paint, especially those trapped or sitting alone in a chair, the innocent ones with a newly awakened sensuality, and those who are waiting.

Menon also disapproves of the exclusive reading of symbolism in her art. Threads, necklaces, kites, animals, or draped fabrics, transparent or opaque, are the ornaments and embellishments that accompany the figure in her work. These are not conscious attempts at symbolism; sometimes it is mere ornamentation, the essentially feminine need to embellish or embroider, and other times it is the need to accentuate or focus on color for purely pictorial reasons such as perspective or tension.

Menon notes that when repeated often enough, a motif becomes a symbol, which in turn becomes a cliche, a cliche becomes an absurdity, a caricature. Thus, in 1992, he organized an exhibition of chairs, trunks, and domestic cupboards, all painted with appropriated images from his paintings. This radical recontextualization of his work constituted a preemptive strike by Menon to remove art from its pedestal. He continued the reimagining of his corpus in his 1996 Mutations series of pentimenti works, in which Menon manipulated images of his best-known paintings on a computer and painted over the prints with acrylics and oils.

Anjolie Ela Menon was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honors, by the Government of India in 2000. Her recent exhibitions include Menongitis-Three Generations of Art at the Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi in 2008 and Gods and Others presented by Apparao Galleries at the Admit One Gallery, New York in 2000. The Times of India at the Jehangir Art Gallery organized a retrospective of her work in 1998. Another retrospective exhibition, Four Decades, was held in Bombay and Bengaluru in 2002. Anjolie Ela Menon has also been honored with a six-month solo exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, which featured her large triptych titled Yatra in 2006.

The above works have appeared in several group exhibitions including Kalpana Figurative Art in India, presented by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) at the Aicon Gallery, London in 2009, Mapping Memories - 2, Painted Travelogues of Bali and Birma at the Threshold Gallery, New Delhi in 2008, and Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi in 2001

WhatsApp -