The Embassy of India inaugurates tomorrow Friday at 7 p.m. on the first floor of the Centro Centro cultural space (Plaza de Cibeles, 1) the exhibition India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art, which will be open until 16 July.
This exhibition brings together a selection of 84 works produced in South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries from the Edwin Binney III collection housed at the San Diego Museum of Art.
The exhibition is divided into two sections. The first, curated by Dr Ladan Akbarnia, offers an in-depth look at the role of the elephant in Indian court painting. Court artists produced splendid paintings and studies of this majestic animal, massive and graceful, powerful and noble, many of which were admired in albums, and others conceived as independent compositions or as designs for transfer to other media. The second, conceived by Dr Sabiha al Khemir, examines court life through images of power, hunting and love.
The San Diego Museum of Art has one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of South Asian painting outside of India, thanks to the bequest of Edwin Binney III (1925-1986), one of the great experts on the subject of our time. The collection, which consists of almost 1,500 paintings, is encyclopaedic in nature, and includes works from all the major schools from the 12th to the 19th centuries, including paintings produced for the Mughal, Deccan, Rajastani and Pahari courts of India. Tickets can be purchased on this website.
