India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art
Venue: CentroCentro
Dates: 23 March–16 July 2023
This exhibition presented a selection of eighty-four works created in South Asia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries from the Edwin Binney III Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art.
The show was divided into two sections. The first, curated by Dr Ladan Akbarnia, took a closer look at the role of elephants in Indian court paintings. Court artists made splendid paintings and studies of this massive, majestic, graceful, powerful, noble animal. Many were displayed in albums, while others were independent compositions or sketches made to be transferred to another medium. The second section, designed by Dr Sabiha al Khemir, examined life at court through images related to power, hunting and love.
The San Diego Museum of Art boasts one of the finest, most comprehensive collections of South Asian painting outside of India thanks to the bequest of Edwin Binney III (1925–1986), one of the twentieth century’s leading experts on the subject. Mr Binney aspired to build an encyclopaedic collection and amassed nearly 1,500 paintings, with examples of every major school from the 1100s to the 1800s, including paintings made for the Mongol, Deccan, Rajasthani and Pahari courts in India.
