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Head ‘Back to the Roots’ with artist Kanwal Dhaliwal
The exhibition titled ‘Back to the Roots’ will be on display in the gallery of the Punjab Kala Bhawan, Sector 16B, Chandigarh, from February 17 to 21
Memory has constantly fought forgetting in the works of Kanwal Dhaliwal, a young man who came to the city from Malout in the Malwa region of Punjab, to follow his passion for sculpting and painting, way back in 1979.
Although happy to have found a way to further his art, he found the urbane city with its modern architecture alien and the four walls of the hostel suffocating. He then chose to rent a room in Karoran village, which he later shared with artist Sidharth, also a student then. He got noticed with his early clay sculptures portraying village life, and later chose to move to the UK and settle there.
However, in the new environment too he always looked back with fondness to the culture he was born to in his landscapes or portraits. The exhibition titled “Back to the Roots”, that is on display in the gallery of the Punjab Kala Bhawan, Sector 16B, from February 17 to 21, is a fond reminder that the Malwai village and wheat fields remained close to his heart. His work is replete with open spaces, old havelis and women and men engaged in everyday tasks that made their life. He captures intensely the resilience which is the very essence of rural life.
The exhibition also includes his portraits of “The Valiant Ones”, the people of Punjab who stood their ground in the worst of times. His portraits of Saadat Hasan Manto, the chronicler of the tragedy of Partition, and Gehal Singh Chhajjalwaddi, who was killed by his own people for sheltering others, make for a poignant narrative. Often the faces of his characters are divided in representation of tragedy of the great cultural divide. Kanwal’s art looks at the past through the windows of the present and that is his vision and concern as an artist.
