Painters of the Progressive Artists Group are, individually and together, among India's most prominent modern artists. Recognition of their work grew substantially from the early 2000s, in India and abroad, and their paintings and drawings now sit in major museum and private collections. The senior figures of Indian modernism include M.F. Husain, Ram Kumar, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta and V.S. Gaitonde, and, a generation earlier, Amrita Sher-Gil. Their drawings, worked in ink or pencil on paper, carry the same concerns as their paintings in a more immediate form.
Drawings by artists such as F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain sit alongside their paintings in museum and private collections.
Painters of the same generation include Krishen Khanna, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jogen Chowdhury, Sakti Burman, Lalu Prasad Shaw, A. Ramachandran, Badri Narayan, Thota Vaikuntam, Sunil Das, Rabin Mondal, K. Laxma Goud, Bikash Bhattacharjee and K.G. Subramanyan. Oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, acrylic on paper or board, and watercolour each carry a different weight and finish, and most of these artists have worked across several of them over a career.
Souza worked across oil on canvas, watercolour and drawing, each with its own register.
K. Laxma Goud is known for small paintings of village life in south India. Thota Vaikuntam's paintings capture rural life in the Telangana region, in bold colour and a rooted, indigenous style.
Vaikuntam's paintings are known for their intense colour and rooted, indigenous style.
Rabin Mondal spent much of his career working in relative obscurity before wider recognition of his totemic figures and heavily worked faces followed. He was born in 1929 and died in 2019.
A Rabin Mondal head, worked in his characteristic heavy, totemic style.
Jogen Chowdhury was born in 1939. His paintings and drawings are marked by sinuous lines, cross-hatching and fine detail, across subjects that include couples and still life.
Jogen Chowdhury's line work is distinguished by cross-hatching and fine detail.
The painters Paresh Maity and Jayasri Burman, and Shuvaprasanna and Shipra Bhattacharya, are married couples among Kolkata's prominent artists. Shuvaprasanna's recurring subjects include owls, crows and Krishna with a flute; Paresh Maity is known for lush landscapes, and Jayasri Burman for cubist-influenced faces. Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, born in 1936, is another Kolkata painter in this company.
Ramananda Bandyopadhyay.
Ganesh Haloi is among India's significant abstract painters, working in gouache on paper with a restrained, geometric vocabulary drawn from landscape. The list continues with Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Seema Kohli, Paresh Maity, Thota Vaikuntam, Paritosh Sen, Ramesh Gorjala, Manu Parekh, Jayasri Burman, K. Laxma Goud, Sunil Das, Chandra Bhattacharya and Bharti Kher.
Vinayak Pasricha.
