Vidya Bhushan

This show presents selected works of Vidya Bhushan (1923 -1996 ) spanning five decades of his life, twenty nine years after the artist’s demise. Born in a small village in Maharashtra, he discovered art and left behind a farming life for the capital of Bombay to undergo formal training at the JJ School of Art. The young Bhushan found a resonance in the turbulent yet impassioned mood of pre-Independent India. In art, the nationalist ideas of the Bengal School were spreading fast into the British academic training that was imparted at JJ School. Along with mastery over western academic realism, his other works of this period in the 40s are in the traditional Indian styles. Yet, even in these early works we can see an urge to break out of given structures in the way a picture plane tilts unexpectedly or the surface breaks into areas of colour. In 1954 he went to Belgrade and there he painted mostly still life, landscape and portraits but with a dramatic change in treatment. Learning the techniques of egg tempera and mosaic gave him a new understanding of form and pictorial surface. Within the genres of still life, landscape and nude/figure studies he experimented with tools and techniques, developing his specific style of layering translucent colours over and over, with broad brush and palette knife. He applied this understanding to his early commission to copy the deteriorating Ajanta Frescoes in the egg tempera medium. This hard won aesthetic he pursued through the 1970’s with an exploration into complete abstraction, returning to the figure in the 80’s and 90’s, working in watercolour and egg tempera, mediums he now used with great freedom. The generations of artists he has mentored at College of Fine Arts, Hyderabad, like Laxma Goud, Vaikuntam, Kavita Deuskar, and Devraj Dakoji to name just a few, speak of his deep influence as an artist and teacher.

This show is in memory of his late daughter Rekha Bhushan.