‘you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young, whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.’

– e.e. cummings

At the core of Breaking the Mould is the indomitable spirit of this year’s graduating students from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. It is the spirit of fresh, exciting artistic enterprise that has weathered the
desolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the troubling forces of disruption that wreaked havoc early this year at their annual fine arts display. It is what Dylan Thomas would write as ‘raging against the dying of the light’ that these artists have broken away from the melancholic disquiet of the past two years, and eclipsed its gloom with their passionate draughtsmanship, visually arresting conceptual interventions, and dynamism of material.

Forgoing the linearity of a graduate display, the exhibition seeks to engage in thematic conversations that allow the artworks to overlap with one another, orienting the viewer towards each artist’s practice singularly as well as in dialogue. Works from the graphics, painting, and sculpture department are exhibited side-by-side, navigating new ways of seeing and participating in developing what the French painter Paul Cezanne called ‘little sensations,’allowing the artists to document their surroundings in their unique styles, rendering new contexts and meanings. It is in such a mobilisation of varied presentations that the exhibition relates thunderous yet serene landscape works interacting with etchings of excited fauna; where prints of  everyday objects like motorcycles and combs rest against eye-catching woollen rugs; where anatomical studies in abstraction compliment fresco tiles depicting our  quotidian existence; where erotically-charged moments freefall onto figurative sculptures of everyday absurdities.

Their semesters might have ended, but the class has just begun.

Curated by Aditi Ghildiyal and Shankar Tripathi