Everything We Do is Music

Close by, the intersection between music and visual forms was further consolidated in the repetitive markings of Nasreen Mohamedi and Prabhavathi Meppayil. Clustered in one edge of the main room, the works by the two artists emphasized the capacity for visual art to embody rhythm and to articulate subjective aural experiences. Mohamedi’s pieces, made while the artist listened to Hindustani classical music, captured a melodic essence. Untitled (c.1970), for example, resembles a framed piece of sheet music with a series of fractured staves falling into an abyss created by the central fold of the paper. This sense of a frenetic disorder resonated with Untitled (c.1970), where layers of black ink lines running from left to right appeared to create vibrations of different frequencies, only to be disrupted by a series of fainter marks that emerge from the center and meander down through the composition, ultimately landing at the bottom edge. Meppayil’s white, chalky canvases had a similar sense of movement achieved by repetitive and precise patterning. Twenty Five Seventeen (2017) presented rows of shallow indentations made with Indian goldsmith tools called thinnam. Twenty Six Seventeen (2017), on the other hand, was inlaid with strands of wire that seemed to propel themselves across the gesso panel, surfacing intermittently before fading again under the work’s facade.

A show of this scope and diversity with strong and enthusiastic curatorial execution can allow certain works to get lost. One such work was Matyas Wolter’s interpretation of a raga, made as a response to Michael Müller’s visceral graphite drawings, which was played through headphones hung on the inner wall of a small alcove. The positioning made the relationship between the works covert. Other groupings of works reinforced one another. Lala Rukh’s delicate Hieroglyphics (2008) was placed in a second gallery space with Vidya Sagar’s abstract geometric drawings and Francesco Clemente’s anthropomorphic series of watercolors, titled Evening Raga (1992). Rukh’s drawings, featuring silver forms floating at different heights of a horizontal expanse brought to mind soft chimes of varying pitches. The radical Pakistani artist’s work, seen in the UK for the first time, was a stunning example of how paintings can embody raga melodies while Clemente’s works, depicting human faces merged with animal parts, expressed a personal esoteric account.