Shrikant Kadam (b.1973) is an accomplished abstract artist in Pune (Maharashtra) India. With a creative journey that spans over the last 23 years and reflects a deep engagement with his thought process. He completed his G.D. Art, Painting, Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune, 1995, Dip.A.Ed., Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, 1996, BFA and MFA, Savitribai Phule University, Pune, 2010, graduating with First Rank and Distinction. His works have been exhibited in solo shows at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2023, 2018, 2013, 2008, 2003, Shridharani Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2022, LDH- Eikowa Art Gallery, Hyderabad, 2022, Art2Day Gallery, Pune, 2018, Waves Art Gallery, Pune, 2009, Suchitra Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, Pradarshak Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, Studio Nepean Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, Vaishwik Art Environment, Pune, 2004 and in group shows at ARTAZZLE Presents ‘Indian Art Marvell’s’ ION Art Gallery, Singapore- 2024, K-Art International Artist Exchange, Busan, Korea, 2021, 079 I Stories Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, 2020, Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 2019, Sudarshan Art Gallery, Pune, 2018, World Art Dubai Gallery Pioneer, New Delhi, 2018, Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2018, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2017, Korea Biennale Seoul, 2017, Punjab University and PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh, 2016, Annual England Gala Bostan & Chicago- Asian Art Gallery, Chennai, 2015, 2014, Gallery Beyond, Mumbai, 2014, 2013, 2007, Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi, 2013, 2006, Museum of Fine Arts, Manasollasa, Chandigarh, 2013, Pune Biennale, Pune, 2013, Hacienda Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2013, MC Ghia Hall, Mumbai, 2013, Indian Oil Show, Mumbai, 2013, Gallery One, New Delhi, 2012, Lila Poonawala Foundation, Pune, 2012, Hotel Sun-N-Sand, Pune, 2016, 2012, Cancer Aid & Research Foundation, Mumbai, 2011, Art mosaic Gallery, Singapore, 2009, Jamaat Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2009, 2008, Ruchikas Art Gallery, Goa, 2008, Kurtz Art Gallery, Germany, 2007, Birla Academy of Arts, Calcutta, 2007, State Art Gallery, Hyderabad, 2007, Contemporary Indian Art by Gallery Beyond, London, 2007, Virgo Art Gallery, Patna, 2006, Studio S & Gallery G, Bangalore, 2004, Posnya Seni Sambung Art Gallery, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2003, World Trade Center Jakarta, Indonesia, 2003, Alliance Francaise de, Goa, 2001, Kalkshetra Art Gallery, Guwahati, Assam, 2000, Gallery Artimediair, Holland, 1999, Holiday Inn, Pune, 1998, Bal Gandharva Ranga Mandir, Pune, 1997 and N.C.P.A. & Y. B. Chavan Centre, Mumbai, 1995.
Additionally, he is one of the committee members of Bombay Art Society and has been awarded by Nag Foundation Scholarship, Germany, 2006, Kalavart Nyas Ujjain, 2003, Maharashtra State Art Exhibition, 1998, 2018, S.C.Z.C.C., Nagpur, 1998, Br. V.V. Oak Prize, Pune, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, Annual Exhibition Award, Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, 1996, Children Friends Circle of India, Pune, 1996, 1995, Bombay Art Society, 2005, 2003, 1996, 1995 and The Art Society of India, Mumbai, 1994. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ekant Residency, Bhavnagar, 2019. He has also been a part of AIFACS All India Artist Camp, New Delhi, 2022, Auroville Artist Camp, Pondicherry, 2021, ‘KARMA’ National Artists Symposium, New Delhi, 2021, PEC University Art Camp, Chandigarh, 2016, Painting Workshop by Akhand lok manch, Sindhudurg, 2016, Painting Workshop by ICAC, Mumbai & Mercedes Benz, Pune, 2016, National Artist Camp by TATA Steel, Jamshedpur, 2014, Artist Camp, Ahmedabad, 2013, All India Artist Camp by The Art Mall New Delhi, Shimla 2007, National Art Festival, Ujjain, 2003, 2001, 2000, 1999, All India Artist Camp, Chhattisgarh, 2002, Guwahati, 2000 and NCPA Workshop, Mumbai, 1995. He has exhibited his works in 13 charity and Fund Raiser shows all over India and donated fund for society.
Concept Note:
When I look back, at my art journey. It started with realistic art and later it turned in to abstract. Nature has been my inspiration. The change of season brings palette of textures and the lights variants. The naturally occurring sounds, vibrations change too. These observations and changes of nature take me to a different level. I constantly wander in nature to get more ideas and motivations.
My constant desire, hunt and experience with nature is my palette of spontaneity. When one stands at the peak of the mountain and experiences the infinite firmament. That is what my paintings are all about. The freedom of strokes is my creativity and ingenuity.
I try to transform the nature through my imagination and portray it in my special manner. Nature is a treasure of mystery, secrets and beauty. I constantly try to assimilate things like the size, space, images, texture and colors as they state my thoughts on canvas
This unending treasure of nature and me. We always communicate. This dialogue takes me places to deliver new shapes and forms. The seen unseen colours of nature. The surroundings probe me to illustrate. The fresh and pleasant colours in nature motivate me. In abstract paintings colours play an important role.
When I start my painting… I first make a communication with the space on canvas, I try to feel the canvas, I observe it. And at spur of moment my inner soul inspires me to a particular colour and that leads me to the discrete statement of art for the day.
Colours bring the shapes some time shapes bring the colours on the canvas. The colors run through the canvas. The canvas, the art starts interacting with me and guides me where to stop. I trail with them.
I always try to paint, what I have experienced from life. That gives me the joy of connecting to that divine, lucid and uncompromising bliss. It also helps in strengthening my colouration, without the direct imitation of nature, I try to find Soul of nature, at the same time self-realization too. A formless nature with the divine feeling.
COLOURS OF MYSTERY
According to the parlance of contemporary art a visual does not always have a meaning. More often than not, the meaning crystallizes in the visual through the content-rich painting process of the artist and persists thereafter through the mutual interaction between the painter and the viewer. The visual meaning is endless since the visual is wrapped in the infinite vibrations of the optical system. When one is able to breach through the micro unit time between two consecutive vibrations his consciousness receives eloquent signals and they all determine the identity, age and dynamic impact of the painting. It is an artist’s constant endeavor to extricate colour from its bondage to the content of the painting and award it new glory of expression and a dimension of wordless communication. And when, at an unknown moment a chemical element permeates his sensory awareness it belongs to him as much as it does to the perceptive viewer. The concerned chemical element too, as if awaits the two. A painting in fact never attains fulfilment without their union. This is as if a union of joy with gratification. And Shrikant Kadam has been successful at forging this union. This is what enables him to guide us into his befitting world of abstraction.
“What a marvel are the colours! They acquaint us with the artist’s disposition, conviction, determination, purposeless purpose and emotion inviting aesthetic distortion, his fascination for the avant garde and his courage in cherishing the new in the old. Shrikant Kadam’s paintings in fact, belong to a genre in which the viewer’s questions themselves are impregnated with answers. They pave the way not only for the direct brilliant light but for diligent darkness as well.”
Dr. Prabhakar Kolte, Mumbai
“Artist Shrikant Kadam is an art maker who lives amongst us common folk, in the everyday hoi polloi of life, airing views of common concern. But turn away from his everyday persona to face his art and you follow down a route of magical colour outbursts, scripting a poetic vocabulary of nature’s forms which the artist conceives as being an overview from a mountain peak. Pander a while longer, and that scenic expanse of sharp jaggedness coagulates the sounds of nature, its vibratory inflexions into a mystic roundedness, while still retaining its jagged vigour untarnished.
When ranged on walls, displayed in their expository strengths they lend themselves to ever evolving stages of interpretation. First of course, is the all-consuming submersion of a colour cascade, devoid of any hint of finished figuration. But that is not enough when face to face with an expose by this artist. Watch a little closer and the eye seems to recede inwards, further and further towards a hidden core, from whence there emerges a burst of exhilaration, not necessarily from a central core but also as a buoyant suffusion, spreading evenly to every corner of the canvas space.
Perhaps the key to his expressiveness can be fathomed from the artist’s personal assessment of his skills when he states, “I try to transform the nature through my imagination and portray it in my special manner.” Yet there is no hint of aggressive robustness detailed in the works. The colours, ranging from a basic palette of ochre, earth brown, leaf green and other grounded elements of nature, merge into a relationship learnt at the feet of Mother nature. Yet magically, they do not define a realistic representation of this or that object of nature. Skirting all hints of a formal suggestiveness, these colour blends script a definition of nature which is worded in a phraseology all his own. The flux of paints and the colours thereof, create a multiplicity of nature depictions which is neither philosophical nor realistic, but which speaks to every viewer as some sort of familiar link, that has been transmitted into his psyche through the multi-dimensional natural tinctures.
Looking at his works again, one realizes how futile is the effort one makes to decipher the contours of natural forms, of mountain peaks and flowing streams and a myriad references in between. The natural forms in these works are not delicate romping’s in a sylvan setting. Rather, they are like powerful nuclei from where one sees sparks of texture and colour emerge to narrate the goings-on in a universe where elements are not static or hidebound, but rather an agitation emerging from a central core.… a statement in which every viewer can find an exhaustive list of natural references, such as the sunset hues reflected down the hillside, or perhaps the painted haze of the sunset on the horizon, where merger and mixture are mingled inexplicably and yet, realistically.
At other times, the works have a certain defining quality in their conceptualization. The extremely controlled brush strokes of colour, barely visible above the surface concentrated to a dominant hue, make for interesting spatial divisions, within the overall solidity. The picture surface suggests the notion of a solid rock face against specks of apologetic colour bits, flotsam-like on the base colour, and directly imbuing themselves into the central circuitry of the viewers’ thoughts,
Having emphasized the seemingly open-ended trend of his depictions, one must concede that the works imbibe in them a characteristic rhythm of staging tendencies by their backdrop techniques. The flat colour surface behind the action in the front of the work, allows for a better grasp of the differing intensity of the image in the forefront. The jagged forms, the plain though bold backdrop, at once provokes simulations of both tactile and chimerical qualities. At other times, when looking once again at the works the output scripts transience and eternity, a solidity with closely held core sentiments, making one feel that in this artist’s nature studies, he is dictating a study of Nature which appears familiar and comforting, drawing viewer visions towards an inner point where the eye is jerked wide awake from sudden eruptions of nature’s unpredictable outbursts, while all around, the space has come to terms with the fury of the elements, or perhaps the eternal cycle of ups and downs, where life and nature intertwine.”
– Subhra Majumdar,
Art Critic, New Delhi
“The creation of art is a passionate event. In a colour-based art like painting wherein the colours hold indispensable value, colour takes on a far more impassioned demeanour in its abstract form. It is an endeavour to satisfy the urge to create an unknown world through the swirling of colour and an artist’s human response to nature by the splattering of colour. In some ways, it is a conflict between the body and the soul of the artist creator. Many an artist is left shattered in the struggle, leaving behind only an array of abstract and forbearing colours. A handful of artist creators however manage to unearth the wisdom of colours. The artist responds in agreement to nature, its illusory power and spirituality and tries to get closest to it.
The Indian culture has largely nourished on a unique spirituality. This spirituality does not pertain to religion in the conventional sense. It is a spirituality that expresses the illusory power of nature and surrounding, makes it manifest and envelopes the artist’s experience with his self. It helps him discover his essence. This of course is a rare phenomenon. In the Indian art, this illusory power of nature can be perceived and experienced in the art of Raza, Ramkumar, Sohan Kadari, Ambadas, Prabhakar Kolte, Laxman Shreshtha right down to Ravi Mandlik.
All this has emerged upon viewing the abstract series by Shrikant Kadam. In the field of art, the new should be welcomed and comprehended only against the backdrop of history and tradition. Unless and until the artist and the viewer do not comprehend the “yesterday” of this art, do not bring the magic of the ancestors within their gamut their experience of the new will be as limited and untainted as the perception and experience of an innocent child. This will enable him to draw temporary pleasure out of viewing per se but he will not get ‘blazed’ by the artwork. Every work of art is undoubtedly a source of joy but the real bliss comes from experiencing the self, the artist’s exploration of his self and the viewer’s compassionate relationship. So long as the union of the artist and the viewer does not take place the viewer cannot partake of the artist’s thrilling, devastating and gushing experience. It is an event which shatters the viewer or the experiencer into innumerable fragments and the new identity that emerges after the fragmentation is what takes him to the bliss of the self as envisaged by the artist creator.
It is therefore that artists like Raza, Ramkumar, Sohan Kadari, Ambadas, Prabhakar Kolte and Laxman Shreshtha who extricated art work from the cacophony of colour and composed the legends of elemental nature and artist’s identity have hinted at a new path. This path undoubtedly is quaint, untrodden and deceitful, leaving the viewer all by himself in the realm of the unknown.
Many paintings in Shrikant Kadam’s abstract series make it brilliantly evident that he has discovered this path and has started treading on it as well. He has found the mentors’ mantra of brushing away the chaos of colour. Another highlight of Shrikant Kadam’s creation is his sense of surrender in not borrowing anything from the predecessors or their tradition. This is a quality he has attained after much hard work, not giving in to mere reproduction and it is going to help him establish himself in this field. It would be worthwhile to discuss another hallmark at this point which resides in taking the landscape of surrounding nature to abstraction. His skill at imparting homogeneity of colour to the landscape in a reposing state is phenomenal. The colours however do get bold whenever at a deceitful juncture the excess fascination for colour traps him into the maya of the various hues. Such junctures are of course rare. If Shrikant Kadam can free himself from the trappings of the illusory power of colour he can certainly place himself in the line of Raza, Ramkumar, Sohan Kadari, Ambadas, Prabhakar Kolte, Laxman Shreshtha. He can define his own spirituality. What more anyway, does an artist aspire for?”
-Mangesh Narayanrao Kale,
Artist, Poet, Art Researcher
