It’s the last chance to catch artists Sumita Acharya and Sheela Padmanabhan’s art works The Marketplace and Glimpses of Kerala, respectively, at a duet show that ends today in the city of Mumbai.
Sumita has a marketing background. She quit her job to pursue her dream as a painter. Her exhibition, The Marketplace, is about bulls and bears, the stockmarket and the portrayal of consumers and brand ambassadors.
She says, "The market always has an impact on the economic lives of nations and the very survival of indigenous people. Whether it is encountered by the individual or the aggregate, the marketplace ultimately bears witness to the economic, political or cultural power struggles that a society faces.”
"Accordingly, the term ‘marketplace’, as used here for my art exhibition, denotes the larger, more expansive, innovative image of a living commercial organism rather than the narrow restrictive meaning ordinarily associated with it,” adds Sumita.
For instance, the loyalty of consumers towards a brand is depicted by the symbolic portrayal of a dog in one of her paintings. "Brand loyalty, in marketing, consists of a consumer’s commitment to repurchase or otherwise continue using the brand and can be demonstrated by repeated buying of a product or service or other positive behaviours such as word of mouth advocacy,” she says.
In another painting she shows how big film stars sometimes lose their own identity while endorsing a brand. "There comes a time when a star is no longer a star but just a brand ambassador. In my painting I have shown a designer watch replacing a star’s eye. The brand overpowers his senses slowly and eventually the brand and its user becomes one.”
Artist Sheela Padmanabhan is born and brought up in Kerala but moved to Mumbai. Her paintings, Glimpses of Kerala, mostly depict the memories of her childhood of the place. She says,
"Every time I go back to Kerala, I see some kind of change. Every thing is becoming modernised slowly and the natural beauty is getting lost somewhere. In my paintings I have frozen time and recreated the beauty of nature from my memories.”
Some of her paintings include scenes of a shepherd in the lush green fields, a man rowing a boat in the backwaters, a group of women dancing, and a pretty girl cuddling a bab goat.