The stirring of desire go back to antiquity. The earliest scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, have various sections devoted to love poetry making it an inevitable and an inherent part of the culture. In the Vedic hymns, the comparison of Usha, the Goddess of Dawn, (Rigveda) to a maiden who unveils her bosom to her lover, shows the erotic element so vividly and beautifully enmeshed in the ‘holy’ books. Erotic poetry finds its first expression in the love-charms of Atharveda. Eros, the Greek God of Physical Desire, found a parallel in Cupid, the Roman God of Love. Its Indian resonance is found in Kama, the Indian God of Love.

This rich treasure of romantic poetry inspired artists to painting these words into visual poetry. The artist realized that the door to the intimate worlds of these paintings is through that richly evocative love poetry. He expressed the feeling of ‘shringara’ though line and colour, symbols and motifs all portrayed within a sensitive approach. Expressing the most exalted of human emotions, that of romantic love between a man and a woman, a love that is richly sensual and yet serenely spiritual. Exploring with it a poetically elegant and richly sensuous female form.

Sensuality, desire, pleasure, celebration, love, romantic moments are all part of both the sacred and the profane in the Indian cultural framework. Kamasutra, the 4th century Indian text, validates and affirms pleasure, sensuality and erotica. It has in many ways become the cannon for the understanding of Indian culture. There is an abundance of sacred literature of the Hindus, which is filled with the sacred lore’s palpitations of feminine dreams and themes gyrating with female fury.

Innumerable tales describe the feminine, there are the goddesses who strike their children with fever, nymphs who seduce sages, celestial virgins who run free in forests and chaste wives who fling themselves on funeral pyres to become guardians feminine virtue. In the domain of the ‘Riti Kalin Kavya’, medieval Bhakti poetry and ‘Saundarya Lahiri’, the feminine has been adored, loved and worshipped. The pursuit of external beauty is narrated, where verses on women described them as a haunting melody and glorious sunset.

As we scroll through the world map, desire, erotic pleasure finds an important and significant emphasis in the cultural ethos of all ancient civilizations. The translations of erotic symbols from different cultures are then carried forward through artists and thinkers.

This exhibition attempts to address the celebration of sensuality, which has been part and parcel of he Indian consciousness since the dawn of civilizations. Through the works of contemporary artists, the exhibition attempts to address the continuous mappings of sensuality, sexuality and desire.