06-Apr-2017 08:18 PM
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Manish Pushkale (b. 1973) is one of the most highly regarded young painters of India today. He holds a Masters degree in geology from Bhopal. Without any formal training in art but with a powerful and sensitive initiation into it in the evocative environs of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Manish has evolved a language of abstraction which carries his own personal imprint. Both his vision and artistic idiom have been growing fast, attaining amazing levels of maturity and significance. While his early training as a geologist is echoed in the organic texturality of his works, the meticulous choice of colors used to layer his works, and his method of applying and wiping off paint tangibly, invoke his complex meditations on asceticism - worldliness, renunciation - sensuality, presence-absence, dying-rebirth and so on. His works are delightful play of formal dichotomies like those of light-shade, mark-erasure, form-formlessness, restraint-excess, control-indulgence, and have matured to a level that confronts and assimilates all these oppositions to achieve a state of refined harmony. Mr. Pushkale has fifteen solo shows to his credit at several prime galleries in and outside the country, and he has participated in almost seven hundred group shows in India and abroad, along with five two-man shows, an idea of jugalbandi between two painters. He is a recipient of the AIFACS Award, the Ministry of Culture’s Junior Research Fellowship, the Artist-in-Residency from the Governments of France and Italy, and the Reliance group, the Kala-Kaustubh Samman, the Spandan Chitrakala Samman and the Raza Foundation Award. He is a Raza Foundation trustee and a member of Garhi Studio selection committee, Ministry of Culture, and a member of the Executive Committee of M.P. Foundation in Delhi. Mr. Pushkale has established “Vaid Samman” an annual award in the honour of Shri K.B. Vaid, a legendary fiction writer of Hindi. This award has already been conferred upon Shri Dhruv Shukla, Shri Uday Prakash and Shri Anupam Misra for their contribution to Hindi literature. Manish Pushkale lives and works in Delhi.