Five Years and Growing

It is February, and time for the Feb Group Show to raise its head once again. I go back five years and remember one cool morning in January 2003 when a group of young artists with hope in their hearts and stars in their eyes sat with me outside the Faculty of Fine Arts canteen, animatedly explaining how they were going to organize 'a show on their own'. I remember how I reacted with caution and apprehension but allowed myself to be carried away by their infectious enthusiasm and honesty of purpose.

Many of us might be quite surprised today to recollect that it was not easy to live the life of an artist in 2003, if you were neither a student nor had already established your credentials with a gallery but were committed to a career in the fine arts. And here was a group of almost a couple of dozen artists with exactly the same qualifications. So organizing ‘a show on their own' was more an attitude of defiance against the then established norms of art exhibition and collection, of negotiating a space for themselves in the Indian contemporary art scene. They collected a contribution from each participating artist to cover basic costs, and roped in a sponsor who funded the catalogue without making a single demand in return. Their show’s success gave them a shot of confidence that fuelled their energies and strengthened their choice to continue thinking and making art. Today, most of the artists in that original group who persevered and continued to work seriously and single-mindedly, have successfully carved a niche for themselves.

This year, in the true spirit of the Feb Group Show, a number of them decided to step aside, to make room for the ‘young ones’. So, Feb Group Show 2007 has just a handful of the 'veterans', with most of the 'young' participating artists perhaps showing for the first time in Baroda. Their work is marked by startling images, an impassioned vocabulary, a genuine effort to explore the visual language such that it reflects the various challenges that contemporary living demands of all of us.

In short, it's like a breath of fresh air. A promise that the Feb Group Show has been assiduously living up to for the last five years.

Sandhya Bordewekar
Vadodara, February 2007