There is something piercing about the woman's gaze. Fashioned after the French painter Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s portrait of Yashwant Rao Holkar II, the Maharaja of Indore, from the 1930s, she looks as if she can see through you. Her name is Sneha. She is one of French-Indian artist Olympe Ramakrishna's 'Women Of Urban India', a series of 12 portraits printed on silk, suspended like saris drying on rooftop terraces.
"Women of Urban India is a tribute to the quiet strength and individuality of contemporary Indian women," Ramakrishna says. "Through each portrait, I explore their stories, their resilience, and the ways they navigate tradition and modernity in the ever-evolving urban landscape. In this exhibition, I focus on active, urban Indian women from the middle class, aged between 20 and 40, whose lives are interwoven by shared experiences."
The installation consists of eleven portraits and a self portrait originally made as oil paintings and reproduced on Dupion silk sarees using modern industrial textile printing technology — anchoring the centuries-old oil painting tradition in the artist's own time, and furthering her analogy of in-betweenness. Born in Normandy, France, and currently based in Bangalore, India, this in-betweenness is autobiographical to Ramakrishna. “Whenever I’m travelling to France these days, visiting my home, displaying my works, a part of India always remains with me,” the artist says.
Drawing from Ramakrishna's education and training as an artist at the École de Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Atelier Artmedium in Paris, and the Battersea Art Center in London, these portraits combine the earthy European palette of muted pastel hues with the vibrant red, brown, and yellow shades of Indian miniature paintings.
The deliberate avoidance of any background in the paintings foregrounds Ramakrishna's formal, compositional, and symbolic enquiries. By placing the highly-detailed depictions of the artist’s muses against flat, bold, and strong colours, Ramakrishna suspends each of the eleven women — Lux, Roopashree, Romi, Shuchika, Charisma, Kavitha, Chandu, Arpitha, Sneha, Hitha, Deepti — and herself, on a surface that elevates their position, their presence, and their feelings.
“The exhibition curates Olympe’s series of powerful portraits that are suspended from the top, fluttering on large-scale dupion silk panels; panels that reminisce upon one of the most ubiquitous garments of Indian society, the sari. Olympe’s visuality and display design allows these women to float around in the gallery; a soaring presence that imbues our viewing experience with a sense of atmosphere and delight.”Shankar Tripathi, Curator
Encountering Ramakrishna's muses — the artist’s acquaintances and confidants from Bangalore's burgeoning middle-class — and the artist herself in this manner allows us to reflect on our own presence and on our own resilience to make sense of a rapidly advancing society that is hurtling itself from one generation to another in a matter of centuries, decades, years, and soon, in days and seconds. In the end, the 'Women of Urban India' reflect the tireless simplicity of Olympe Ramakrishna’s artistic pursuit — her love of the feminine, and for her endless desire to make art.
'Women Of Urban India' is on view at the Alliance Française de Delhi from March 8 till March 18, 2025.
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