Nepali artist at Miami Art Week

This year’s Miami Art Week brought high-profile openings and exhibitions with some exciting exhibitions and installations from South Asia and Nepal.

The event was a dynamic mix of galleries, immersive installations and schedule packed with must-see art fairs, pop-ups, and cultural events with Art Basel taking centre stage. 

This was the 22^nd edition of Art Basel and brought in 286 galleries from 38 countries, the largest contemporary art event in US with 75,000 visitors, collectors and art lovers. 

The Art Week has the NADA fair featuring the work of Nepali ceramic artist Shushank Shrestha, who had a whole booth by the French Gallery, Galerie Lefebvre & Fils. Louis Lefebvre, director of the gallery had reached out to Shrestha last year after seeing photos of his graduating show in New York.  

A whole booth for a single artist is an honour, and it showcased Shrestha’s 14 brightly coloured ceramic figures that playfully explore mythical characters from Nepali culture and blends it with the artist’s fascination for super-heroes. The figures evoke a touch of humour, childhood memories of fun and family moments. 

Shrestha’s mastery in the techniques of ceramic making can be observed from the glazed gigantic, free-standing multi-coloured Garuda with extended wings that take centre stage. It has minute details providing an emotional connection to viewers familiar with Nepali culture. 

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The exhibition drew much attention from visitors, with many marveling at its attractive presentation and the artist’s ability to maneuver the flexible medium into imaginative characters through the coiling technique. 

The challenge of ceramic making is that the process from the start to the finish is delicate, the clay itself being sensitive to moisture when moulding and to heat when firing. 

Shrestha’s booth is a powerful reminder that Nepali artists have entered the world stage following the footsteps of Lain Singh Bangdel, Siddhimuni Shakya, Lok Chitrakar, Mukti Singh Thapa, Udaya Charan Shrestha, Ang Tsherin Sherpa, Hitman Gurung, Koshal Hamal, Sneha Shrestha, and others. 

Shushank Shrestha is a Kathmandu-based artist and a graduate of New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He received his BFA from Kathmandu University School of Arts in 2016, and his work has been exhibited in Nepal, Pakistan, China, France, and the United States. 

Galerie Lefebvre & Fils was founded by Henri Lefebvre in 1880 with an eclectic collection and has a legacy of exchanges with museum curators and ties with private collectors. In 2009, the gallery started to focus on contemporary ceramics, highlighting the renewing nature of the medium and its relevance to society. 

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Another highlight of the art week was the Great Elephant Migration from India. The installation on Miami’s South Beach featured a hundred life size elephants from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in South India. The individual elephants were all hand crafted by Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 local indigenous artisans and designed by Shubhra Nayar. 

The elephants are made from an invasive weed that crowds out other native species and reduces biodiversity threatening to overtake the natural habitat of Indian elephants. The project also provides sustainable income for the local community through 20 villages with workshops that make the elephants. 

Ashish Kapoor, a London-based Indian artist, sucks viewers into a vertiginous concavity that confound our perception.  Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan American multi-disciplinary artist presents culturally specific and transnational presentations of contemporary realities, while offering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis. 

Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha is curator at the Nepal Art Council.