Affordable art by Chennai veteran artists at Cholamandal Artists’ Village, displayed

Micro Trends 2021, a display of affordable miniature and small format works by 23 artists at Cholamandal Artists’ Village, aims to takes art beyond a niche audience

In 1971, KCS Panicker, president of the Progressive Painters’ Association founded in 1944, led a brigade of artists from Madras to Pune to display miniature works. To everyone’s surprise, they returned empty-handed having sold all the artworks. Veteran artist P Gopinath was one among them. He recalls, “Back then, the artworks were priced from ₹25 to ₹100.” Students and unconventional patrons who wished to make inroads into art collection through accessible art, made up most of the buyers. “They used to tell us that they liked paintings and sculptures but didn’t have a big space to exhibit large artworks,” says Gopinath. Thanks to the overwhelming response, the same group then showed in Bombay and Madras in 1972, only to meet a similar interest. In 2021, after a bleak year coloured by an ongoing pandemic, the same format makes up Micro Trends 2021, a physical exhibition that shows works of 23 artists at Cholamandal Artists’ Village. Though Micro Trends was earlier shown in 2015 and 2017, this time around, it becomes the first physical exhibition that the participating artists have been in, since a year.