Shailja Art Gallery presents The Contemporary Lore: Sojourn of Styles and Generations Unfurled, an exhibition that challenges how we understand artistic genealogy in contemporary practice.
Rather than archiving art history, this exhibition stages a living conversation—bringing together 23 artists across vastly different career stages, formal vocabularies, and conceptual concerns. The result is a curation where a seasoned practitioner's decades-long meditation sits alongside an emerging artist's experiments, each illuminating the other.
Curated by Kiran K. Mohan with a critical essay by art historian Johny ML, The Contemporary Lore operates on a simple but radical premise: that artistic lineages are not linear, and that the most generative conversations happen when we stop organising by age or achievement, and instead listen for resonance across time, material, and intention.
Speaking about the show, Kiran K. Mohan says, This collection of artworks on display is not only about the artists skills it's about the conversation that it initiates.Each Artist is looking for an appropriate language through their artistic decisions to choose their mediums."The Contemporary Lore: Sojourn of Styles and Generations Unfurled," is the beginning to collectively create awareness and make the presence amongst the art lovers, both for the artists and the gallery.
The exhibition includes works by Anil Gaekwad | Ashok Bhowmick | Asit Patnaik | Bharti Prajapati | Bipin Kumar | Charudatt | Dilip Sharma | Haren Thakur | Harshwardhan Devtale | Hemraj | Jaikrishna Agarwal | Manoj Kumar Agarwal | Milan Das | Meenakshi Jha Banerjee | Mukesh Bijole | Nilisha Phad | Pandurang Thate | Prem Singh | Rakhi Kumar | Sanjay K. Srivastava | Sekhar Kar | Shaji Apukuttan | Yusuf
The showcase spans paintings, sculptures, and mixed media—each work selected for the specificity of its investigation. What emerges is a portrait of how contemporary artists across India are thinking through material, form, figuration, abstraction, and identity anew.
Visitors will encounter:
- Senior artists whose practices span decades of experimentation
- Mid-career practitioners navigating institutional and personal shifts
- Emerging voices bringing new urgency to longstanding artistic problems
The arrangement is deliberately non-chronological—a deliberate choice that asks: What if we stopped seeing art history as a progression and started seeing it as a landscape?
Shailja Jain, Founder & Director, Shailja Art Gallery, says: "By presenting these 23 practices side by side—not hierarchised, not contextualised by career stage, but as equal partners in a larger artistic conversation—we're making visible the connective tissue of contemporary practice. The Indian art scene has long been dominated by the same rotation of masters. But a metamorphosis is underway, as contemporary stalwarts steadily make their mark. The next generation of artists are ready to find their footing, yet are held back by prevailing geographical and socio-political barriers. Shailja Art Gallery believes they deserve equal attention—and The Contemporary Lore is here to give it. This dialogue between experience and emerging vision is what gives the show its unique depth."
The Contemporary Lore arrives at a specific moment: when the Indian art world is increasingly segmented by market categories (emerging, mid-career, established), by geography, by medium. This exhibition proposes a different organising principle—one based on artistic rigour and conceptual generosity rather than commercial or institutional convenience.
By bringing these 23 artists into conversation, Shailja Art Gallery asks: What would happen if we reorganised how we see contemporary art—not by individual achievement, but by shared artistic questions and material concerns?
Date: 9 May 2026 — 14 May 2026
Time: 11 am to 7 pm
Venue: Bikaner House, New Delhi
Subsequent Venue: Shailja Art Gallery, Gurugram, 17 May 2026 – 13 June 2026
