New Delhi – April 25, 2025: The Lexicon Art Gallery launched “Alchemy of Matter – New Materiality and Studio Practices at Baroda”, a major curatorial project that underscores a tectonic shift in contemporary Indian art. The exhibition, conceived by curator Rahul Bhattacharya, opened with a preview at The Main Art Gallery, Bikaner House, drawing collectors, artists, and cultural patrons from across the country. The exhibition continues from April 26–29, 2025, before relocating to The Lexicon Art Gallery in Connaught Place, where it will run from May 5 to June 10, 2025.
The exhibition puts the spotlight on sixteen artists from Baroda, a city long considered a bastion of narrative painting and mediatic realism. However, Alchemy of Matter highlights a crucial departure: artists are no longer merely representing stories through traditional formats—they are directly engaging with material as both medium and message.
Guests at the preview included influential figures such as Raka Bal, Neelam Pratap Rudy, Shilpi Gupta, Rennie Joyy, Manoj Arora, Kanchan Chander, Monika Jain, and Nelofar Currimbhoy, signaling the exhibition’s wide cultural resonance.
Baroda’s Artistic Transformation: Beyond the Narrative
Baroda’s legacy in Indian art history is well documented. From its pivotal role in nurturing the Narrative movement to becoming a center for political commentary through visual realism, the city has held a central place in the evolution of contemporary Indian art. However, Alchemy of Matter shifts the lens dramatically. Rather than focusing on representational strategies, the exhibition celebrates how artists are reconstructing meaning through materials themselves.
The works on display—by artists including Mayur Gupta, Sashidharan Nair, Indrapramit Roy, Anuj Poddar, Ganesh Gohain, Santana Gohain, Chander Prakash, Vinod Daroz, and Alok Bal, among others—explore an emergent paradigm: materiality as content.
This shift is not merely aesthetic; it is philosophical. It reflects a generation-spanning inquiry into how materials like clay, wood, glass, bronze, and even industrial detritus carry embedded histories. Artists from Baroda are not repurposing these materials arbitrarily; they are interrogating them, using their tactile properties to create new cultural and political vocabularies.
Material as Message: A New Artistic Grammar
Curator Rahul Bhattacharya articulates this shift precisely. “Materials are not mute—they argue, provoke, and remember. What’s unfolding in Baroda is not a nostalgic return but a focused reorientation. The studio has become a laboratory for material thought, not merely a site of image-making,” he stated during the preview.
His words find resonance in the exhibited works. Pieces that appear deceptively minimalist on first glance are revealed, upon closer inspection, to contain intricate dialogues between form, texture, and socio-political subtext. For instance, Sashidharan Nair’s use of terracotta invokes both craft lineage and the fragility of cultural continuity. Meanwhile, Alok Bal’s mixed media installations transform industrial waste into stark meditations on displacement and memory.
The artists challenge the modernist hierarchy that privileged concept over craft. By foregrounding process, tactility, and material presence, they are reclaiming the language of the studio as a space of direct social engagement.
Multigenerational Studio Culture in Baroda
An exceptional quality of the exhibition is its cross-generational scope. The inclusion of both mid-career practitioners and emerging artists fosters a dynamic conversation that reflects the richness of studio culture in Baroda today. The diversity of mediums—ranging from fired ceramics and fused glass to recycled wood and woven fibers—illustrates an organic evolution rather than a curated trend.
Veteran artist Indrapramit Roy draws from decades of material experimentation to craft poetic abstractions that retain a quiet urgency. By contrast, younger artists like Uday Mondal and Lochan Upadhyay inject bold new idioms into the space, often drawing upon vernacular traditions and local ecological concerns to create politically sensitive works without resorting to overt symbolism.
The emphasis on process-oriented practice rather than thematic representation signifies a broader recalibration of priorities within the contemporary art world. Here, form is not in service of content—it is the content.
According to Mamta Nath, Founder of The Lexicon Art Gallery, the exhibition offers more than aesthetic stimulation. “Alchemy of Matter is a comprehensive glance into the culture of experimentation flourishing in Baroda. Viewers will find themselves engaging with unfamiliar materials and unexplored ideas. The opportunity to interact with the artists will deepen their understanding of these complex works,” she said.
This focus on viewer interaction and intellectual exchange adds another layer to the exhibition. Rather than prescribing interpretations, the show invites audiences to dwell within ambiguity, to consider how material choices reflect not only aesthetic decisions but socio-political stakes.
Public programming at The Lexicon Art Gallery is expected to include artist talks, studio walkthroughs, and discussion forums, further anchoring the exhibition in discursive space. This approach aligns with contemporary global curatorial practice, where the exhibition is a starting point for dialogue rather than a definitive statement.
A defining feature of the exhibition is its explicit emphasis on re-politicising material. While earlier generations of Baroda artists were known for visual commentary on social conditions, this cohort shifts the terrain. The politics of their practice is inherent in the material itself—not a message wrapped in representation but one inscribed in texture, form, and context.
Ceramics, once associated with functional craft, are now loaded with questions of ecological fragility and cultural continuity. Bronze casting is revisited not for monumentality but for its labor implications. Textile becomes a site for discussing gendered labor, migration, and regional identity. The material becomes an index of larger structural tensions, from environmental collapse to postcolonial anxieties.
This makes Alchemy of Matter not just an exhibition but a manifesto for a new direction in Indian contemporary art—one where aesthetic integrity is inseparable from critical thought.
Redefining the Role of the Curator
Curator Rahul Bhattacharya’s approach marks a significant contribution to how Indian art is being contextualised today. Eschewing the safe comfort of retrospectives or thematic showcases, Bhattacharya builds an argument around material agency and studio philosophy. His curation insists on confronting the viewer with complexity, resisting neat categorisations.
Bhattacharya’s assertion that “the medium doesn’t represent the message—it is the message” reverses decades of inherited assumptions about art’s role as a mirror. Here, art is not reflecting society—it is building new frameworks through the matter itself. This subtle but firm repositioning reflects a larger curatorial maturity gaining ground in India’s art ecosystem.
Alchemy of Matter at once celebrates and complicates Baroda’s position within the Indian art landscape. By emphasizing material experimentation and studio-based practice, it offers a fresh paradigm for engaging with contemporary art—one where objects are not passive carriers of meaning but active participants in discourse. The exhibition brings together an impressive range of voices from different generations, all tied together by a commitment to material inquiry and critical engagement.
At a time when much of the global art conversation revolves around identity, technology, and spectacle, Alchemy of Matter stands out for its quiet radicalism—asserting that meaning can emerge from material, and that the studio remains a vital space for intellectual and political thought. As the exhibition continues at Lexicon Art Gallery, it offers an opportunity for viewers, collectors, and critics to witness how Baroda’s studios are not only preserving legacies but also reshaping the future of Indian contemporary art.
