Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Sheena Wagstaff with Reliance Foundation chairperson Nita Ambani

(Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

India’s richest woman with a $20 billion family fortune and a 27-story sky palace in India’s south Mumbai, billed as the world’s most expensive home for its $1 billion estimated cost – Nita Ambani is now eyeing the art world. Her new interest is the conservation of Indian art forms and making them more widely known internationally. Recently her Reliance Foundation sponsored an exhibition of traditional Indian pichwai paintings of Shrinathji, the Ambani family deity, at the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s also the biggest funder of the new Met Breuer’s debut show of modernist drawings by Nasreen Mohamedi, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the U.S. Nasreen’s exhibition ‘Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living’ made its debut at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain this past September.

During an interview Nita says that she is planning a museum of her own in India with an exhibition space for traveling art shows to be housed in a massive convention centre that she’s building on a 19-acre plot close to her Mumbai school. To be opened in 2018, it will include exhibition areas, a 2,000-seat theatre, retail spaces, offices and residences.

Reliance is India’s largest private company, founded by Mr. Mukesh Ambani’s father Dhirubhai Ambani. Mukesh Ambani recently announced his foray into Reliance Jio with an investment of Rupees 1.5 trillion.

Talking about her interest in the world of art, Nita says, “When I set up the Reliance Foundation in 2010, I was keen that it promotes and nurture India’s ancient heritage in a holistic way. When the people from the Art Institute came to see me, I saw an opportunity to showcase our culture to a global audience.” Madhuvanti Ghose, the Art Institute’s curator of Indian art, says, “The speed at which the Ambanis work; no one else can surpass them. As for Ms. Ambani art is a new door for her, but now that she’s walked through, she sees how desperately we need her.”

Indian collectors have already ascended the upper ranks in the world of art. Hotelier Anupam Poddar and Kiran Nadar, the wife of HCL Technologies’ founder, Shiv Nadar have opened private museums for their contemporary art collections in the greater New Delhi.

Madhuvanti says, “Nita sits at the top of India’s wealthiest families, a tastemaker whose travels and causes are closely followed in Mumbai and elsewhere. Until now, she was best known for promoting health and education initiatives—as well as cheering on her husband’s cricket team and soccer league—but her artistic interests, besides dance, have long been something of a mystery.”

Nita’s love for art and sculptures reflects at her Mumbai mansion. Nita says she has slowly added modern and contemporary artworks, nearly all Indian, from earthy abstracts by M.F. Husain to the gold orb sculpture by Anish Kapoor that hangs in her living room. She recently commissioned Subodh Gupta to create a 9-foot-long installation using metal and brass cooking vessels to create a map of Mumbai.

According to a recent Forbes report Nita has been named the most powerful businesswoman in Asia by Forbes, leading a list of 50 women leaders from the region that includes eight from India.

Source – http://www.blouinartinfo.com/

Nasreen Mohamedi (18 March – 5 June 2016) at The Met Breuer, New York, is by far the most comprehensive exhibition of any Indian artist in the United States. With more than 150 works by Mohamedi on display, the exhibition brings to an international audience more than three
decades of her work, comprising of her few early oil paintings, collages, drawings in ink and graphite, watercolours, and photographs. Mohamedi rarely theorized or spoke about her work but documented her internal dialogue in a form of soliloquy, in tiny personal diaries and notebooks, some of which will be on display in the exhibition. The exhibition explores the conceptual complexity and visual subtlety that made her practice unique in its time.

​In the history of Indian Modernism, Mohamedi remains a distinct figure who broke away from the dominant figurative-narrative mainstream practice and became one of the outstanding artists who pioneered the trajectory of non-representational and non-objective art in India, as well as creating a body of work vital to the evolution of international modernism and abstraction.

In cultivating an interiorised vision, Mohamedi sought to reflect beyond the familiar and the known, arriving at a pristine form of abstraction quite apart from her contemporaries. The grids and geometry she leaned toward in the 1970s were not without precedent though. In the West, closer to her time, were Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Constructivists. Closer to home were the mystical traditions of the East that relied on geometry for a symbolic manifestation of the universe and its creative force. Drawing upon this range of inspirations, Mohamedi evolved her own formal vocabulary with delicate grids using only line, and this aesthetic informed and infused the photographs she took throughout her life.

Mohamedi’s practice has garnered serious attention within India and globally only in the last fifteen years. Though admired in her lifetime, she remained enigmatic and elusive, quite the reflection of her work – a distilled oeuvre that does not lend itself to ordinary comprehension. Through her uncompromising singular pursuit, Mohamedi arrived at a harmonious melding of the rational and the poetic, the philosophical and the mystical.

Kiran Nadar, Chairperson and Founder of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, “This is a momentous occasion for KNMA, having collaborated with two veteran institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States and the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain, in bringing Nasreen Mohamedi’s individualistic/distinctive practice to the western world. The museum’s mandate is also focused on artists whose practice is yet to receive desiring attention and critical acclaim. We believe that their stories be told.”

Credits http://www.yareah.com/2016/02/08/new-york-exhibits-a-retrospective-of-the-indian-modernist-nasreen-mohamedi-opens-at-the-met-breuer/