A brush with Mehlli Gobhai

Chemould Prescott Road reopens with an exhibition that sheds light on breakthrough moments in the artist’s 70-year career

Last year in March, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, was hosting Don’t Ask Me about Colour, a large-scale retrospective of the late artist Mehlli Gobhai, when the world shut down. Naturally, curators Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania were disappointed; they had put in more than three years of work into the show. Over a year on, today, Fort-based Chemould Prescott Road will be reopening its doors after four months with Mehlli Gobhai: Epiphanies, an edited extract of Don’t Ask Me about Colour.

“Nancy, Shireen Gandhy [creative director, Chemould Prescott Road] and I were committed to revisiting the show, and presenting it again, in a new avatar,” shares Hoskote. The exhibition highlights breakthrough moments in the artist’s practice. Adajania notes that they’ve approached and designed Epiphanies as a museum-level exhibition presented in a gallery. “Viewers are encouraged to savour Gobhai’s works while also referring to the wall texts for biographical and art-historical contexts,” Adajania shares. 

Mehlli Gobhai

The show draws on Gobhai’s life in New York and Mumbai;  it includes paintings, drawings, graphic works, sculptures and notebooks, as well as glimpses of his expanded practice as an author of children’s books. “We have the explosion of colour in the 1970s, in mixed-media work that incorporates watercolour, casein, and graphite. We have the move towards grey, umber and black and the austere geometry of plumb line and zigzag in the late 1970s. Then, there’s the night-sky-like darkly luminous works of 1981-82. These were breakthroughs during his New York phase,” elaborates Hoskote. From Gobhai’s later phase in Mumbai, the exhibition captures his early exploration of sculptural form in 1994 and his constructed canvases of the early 2000s, he adds.

Both shows, Adajania points out, are tributes to their friendship with Gobhai, which began in 1990. “We’ve gone back to conversations with Gobhai, his favourite stories, the amusing and the melancholy aspects of his personality. Epiphanies is about the joy of having known him; about the unbroken spell of enchantment that his art has cast on us for years,” she shares. 

Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania

Installing a live exhibition at the gallery feels satisfying, admits Gandhy: “I’ve known both curators for the best part of my life, but it was the first time that the two have navigated my space together. It was like allowing them into one’s home, entering the kitchen and cooking up a lovely meal.” 

Till August 31; 11 am to 5 pm 
At Queens Mansion, G Talwatkar Marg, Fort. 
Call 22000211 

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