The exhibition India. Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art will be presented at CentroCentro this morning at 12 noon. The event will feature speeches by Roxana Velásquez Martínez del Campo, director of the San Diego Museum of Art; Ladan Akbarnia, curator of the exhibition; and Giulietta Zanmatti Speranza, artistic director of CentroCentro. The exhibition will be open until 16 July.
This exhibition brings together a selection of 84 works from the Edwin Binney III collection housed in the San Diego Museum of Art from South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. 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 India, thanks to the bequest of Edwin Binney III (1925-1986), one of today’s leading experts in the field. The collection, comprising nearly 1,500 paintings, is encyclopaedic in nature and includes works from all the major schools from the 12th to the 19th centuries, including paintings for the Mughal, Deccan, Rajastani and Pahari courts of India.
