Amitabh Ashesh
Amitabh Ashesh's forthcoming exhibition Yun Bhi, scheduled to be held at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, from June 10-16, 2025, unveils a new conceptual and painterly platform âYufism'. The neologism encapsulates fluid and genre defying artistic tenets aimed to transcend conventional categories of abstraction and figuration. Resulting works dwell in a liminal space where the visible, the invisible, and the metaphorical coalesce. Yufism, as posited by Amitabh, resists easy classification, embodying instead a poetic visuality that reconfigures perception and meaning.
Trained under Frank Lobdell, renowned for his contributions to the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Amitabh inherits a sensibility rooted in the idea of the image's autonomy. Lobdell's emphasis on abstraction bearing a vestige of corporeality echoes subtly through Amitabh's canvases. However, Amitabh does not merely echo his mentor's idiom; he reworks and transcends it. His visual grammar moves beyond expressive abstraction or narrative figuration, into a painterly syntax that fuses the symbolic and the mundane in a surreal yet coherent schema.
In the philosophical terrain of Yufism, everyday phenomena are transfigured: a raindrop becomes a part of an intricate pattern, akin to a bead in the temporal necklace of daily life; waves morph into vestments, where nature entwines with the human form; windows dissolve their architectural constraints to become luminous, drifting fragments, suggestive of memory, cognition, and fleeting thought. What unfolds on the canvas is not simply a depiction, but a layered act of meaning-making, part memoir, part imagination inviting viewers to see the world through altered lenses.
Amitabh's compositions draw generously from personal experiences, his familial and domestic surroundings, gardens, sports engagements, intercultural encounters, and human relationships. These quotidian motifs are not presented as anecdotes, but rather elevated into a universal resonance through evocative titling and poetic nuance. Each work offers dual channels of engagement: through the visual field and through the associative power of language. In this, Amitabh achieves a rare synthesis where word and image operate in tandem, forming parallel cognitive routes that expand the horizon of interpretation.
What renders Yufism particularly potent is its refusal to be anchored within geographical or stylistic confines. The interpretative tension between cultural signs and their visual embodiments destabilizes any single reading, making room for an open, dynamic, and plural engagement. Rooted in lived Indian realities yet gesturing outward, Amitabh Ashesh's work asserts a new visual paradigm, at once intimate and universal, anchored and transcendent. Through Yufism, he not only reimagines painterly expression but also reinstates art as a field of philosophical and emotional enquiry.
