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Helping rural and urban art get Recognition : India Art Festival 2017

An art exhibition can be engrossing, fun, and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. But when several galleries join to give their artists at one single venue, it leads to a series of conversations between artists and viewers, curators and viewers, and between the works of art themselves.
India is a reservoir of talent in art, being the home country of a large number of exceptionally brilliant artists including painters, authors, singers etc.
But as famed French artist Henri Matisse had said, creativity takes courage. And Kalavishkar, an organization that endeavors to democratize Indian Art, has depicted the courage of bringing together different galleries and artists from different parts of the world.
India Art Festival, a mega art fair presented its second edition from 19 to 22 January 2017 at Thyagaraj Stadium, INA Colony, New Delhi, with the participation of 35 art galleries along with 400 associated artists along with independent ones from six countries and 25 different cities from all over the globe in 100 specially designed booths. A total of 400 artists and close to 4000 artworks were on the visual arts platter of IAF visitors this year.
The event was inaugurated by Hon. Shri Vijay Goel, Union Minister of Youth Affairs and sports (independent charge), Eminent Sculpturist Padmabhushan awardee Ram Sutar, Eminent Artist D.P Sibal, renowned artist Shri Jatin Das, Smt Deepa Chandra (Additional Director General, Doordarshan). It was pursued by a VIP preview till late in the evening. All the visitors were astounded by the beautiful artworks of various artists. They appreciated the efforts of the art galleries which they put to display the works of these artists from all over the world. The India art festival has passed on these budding artists a promising platform to get their talent acknowledged.
In this four-day event, galleries and creative people from rural and urban areas displayed all kinds of artworks including paintings, sculptures, photographs, original prints, serigraphs and installations. Visitors experienced the unbridled form of refreshing creativity to satiate almost all kinds of dainty visual tastes – like seascapes, landscapes, cityscapes, rural and urban scenarios, nudes, figurative, still-life, semi-abstracts & abstracts, highly realistic, religious and spiritual artworks – under one roof.
IAF Managing Director Rajendra said: “Monopoly, in art deprives several artists from the art fair tour. What we require is the expansion of choices presented to art buyers and collectors by showing them diverse visual art products by both rural and urban artists. India Art Festival aspires to do exactly that.”
In the last eight years, many of IAF discovered artists have been invested into the gallery system and have become part of the mainstream art circuit at large, Rajendra said.
He added: “The large number of visitors, including artists, artwork galleries, art buyers and art connoisseurs has led to success of eight editions of the IAF at Mumbai and New Delhi.”
IAF attracted a little over 200,000 visitors in their last editions.
Being the lone multi-city art fair in India that hosts annual auditions in Mumbai and New Delhi every year, IAF facilitates artists to create a network with the art galleries and hip galleries to build a bond with art dealers, collectors and buyers.
Kalavishkar also publishes the Indian Contemporary Art Journal, its in-house quarterly magazine on visual arts published since 2009.
Art is a true mirror of people’s minds, and speaks when words fail. It creates a diverse scope of human activities in creating artworks, expressing the author’s imaginative or technical skill.