The Hindu : New Delhi News : Sculpting spirit of life in its fullness

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Sculpting spirit of life in its fullness

Kunal Diwan

Showcasing human form in aesthetic stances through sculptures

Still motion: A bronze sculpture by Dimpy Menon, to be displayed at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi from Saturday.

NEW DELHI: An eight-day-long exhibition of sculptures titled “The Spirit of Life” by Dimpy Menon opens at India Habitat Centre here this Saturday.

Presented by HSBC Bank and organised by art enterprise SUNO, the exhibition will display the Bangalore artist’s body of work that captures the acrobatic and graceful movements of the human body. Channelling her intensely personal experiences through her powerfully evocative sculptures, Dimpy uses her creations to reflect images of her inner self.

Freezing moments

Her work portrays the human form stretched to its limits in aesthetic stances, freezing the moment, exposing a dynamic stillness and connecting the process and the product in a unique way.

“Bronze casting is physically exacting. A dancer invests a lot physically and emotionally to achieve a similar apparent effortlessness. Both the artist and the artiste take pains to eliminate any sign of the immense hard work required to enact that single moment,” says Dimpy.

Holistic art

Though she has held exhibitions of her canvases, etchings and multimedia creations, Dimpy admits that bronze is her first love. “Sculpture is the most complete of the fine arts. You need drawing, you need to understand space and think in three dimensions. Then there is the sheer permanency of the work,” she continues.

According to Uma Prakash of SUNO, Dimpy’s works have an ethereal quality, sometimes enclosed in a cosmic circle and at times prostrate. “To be so profound yet accessible is a gift given only to a select few,” she adds.

Content of work

Sometimes embarking on the creation of large works, her compositions indicate the artist’s preoccupations—relationships, movement and the moment that resonates with both past and present experiences as well as future hopes. A firm believer in the “sunshine” philosophy, Dimpy believes not in ignoring the dark, but in choosing the light.

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