“The Gauhati Artists’ Guild was initiated in the year 1976 by a group of like minded creative peop
“The Gauhati Artists’ Guild was initiated in the year 1976 by a group of like minded creative people. The institution is among the fore runners in the field of Art & Culture in North east India. The GAG as it is warmly addressed has emerged as a leading premier platform to promote Art of North East to the entire world.
The Gauhati Artists’ Guild has presently over 75 practising artists as members both Executive and Associate members and an enormous list of students. The alumni has a good number of versatile talented young talents who has taken the art scene with confidence and has moved into the world of Art to make their own space.
Every space and time has its own spatio-temporal realities. The ‘thinking people’ of that definite time and space try to critically map and mediate these realities by various intellectual/creative means and strategies. Assam, a state situated in the eastern corner of the country facing a plethora of challenges particularly in the realm of visual arts, saw this attempt for mapping and mediation in the activities initiated by GAG – “Gauhati Artists’ Guild” founded in the mid seventies of the last century. The challenges were many – first and foremost being the “Survival angst” in a society where newer idioms and modern vocabularies of art found limited acceptance. Besides creating an atmosphere for art awareness and resolving the infrastructural inadequacies of all sorts, transcending the polarities of the rational/intuitive, aestheticism/ materialism both in terms of the ideational/ideological and economical or financial contexts were of immediate concern. (Though these may seem like things of past and almost irrelevant today!). The fate of the artists of that time was like, as aptly been compared by writer artist Bhupendra Narayan Bhattacharya in his editorial in the Silver Jubilee edition of the Chinha, the journal of GAG, that of the protagonists of Marques in “Love at the time of Cholera” who keeps shunting between the banks of “Realism” and “Romanticism” with their eternal dilemma about where to land and why.
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http://www.gauhatiartistsguild.org.in
