Hemant Gavankar’s MAGIC ERASE
At the crossroad of nostalgia and urban velocity, artist Hemant Gavankar welcomes viewers to a realm where memory sputters like a used neon sign, visible, fading and defiantly persistent. MAGIC ERASE, his first solo exhibition, curated by Sibdas Sengupta, is on view at Art Centrix Space, Vasant Kunj, from April 6 to May 5, 2025. The show is also a touchstone for Gavankar’s growing artistic practice, as well as Art Centrix’s investment in supporting new voices, which includes programs like the Art Centrix Painting Grant, of which Gavankar is the recipient this year.
Deeply entrenched in the lived and multilayered cityscape of Mumbai, Gavankar’s practice is a sensitive excavation of memory, displacement and the psychic residues of urban transformation. His mixed-media paintings and video works function as palimpsests — marks of what used to be even as they attempt to negotiate peace with what is rapidly becoming. In a stylistic voice that flirts with magical realism, he collapses the real and the hyper-real, encouraging us to examine what we think is permanent in a world where skylines dissolve as easily as digitized code.
The title of the show, MAGIC ERASE, refers not only to the disappearing of the physical — neighborhoods razed, identities reimagined — but also to the subtle disappearing acts that unfold within our emotional landscapes. In Gavankar’s world, erasure is not mere subtraction; it is transformation. The specter of vanished fleets doesn’t just fade — it lingers. His imagery plays between personal and collective memories, between a sense of longing and unease.
Sengupta’s curatorial eye gives Gavankar’s work room to breathe — he doesn’t hit the audience over the head with an overly literal narrative of the show, trusting us to recover our way through these spectral landscapes of memory and reconstruction. The effect is an evocative, almost cinematic one — in which paintings flicker with invisible histories and moving images gleam with half-remembered dreams.
Art Centrix, as ever, is more than a gallery. It’s a stage for storytelling, a place for artists like Gavankar to step out front and lead not just display, but the current around the display. The Art Centrix Painting Grant 2024, which Gavankar is awarded, is evidence of the gallery’s commitment towards investing in more nuanced, critical voices in the Indian contemporary art circuit.
In MAGIC ERASE, Gavankar does not provide answers—he provides traces. Just enough of a scraped color to reveal the shadow underneath. A familiar, albeit peculiarly realized, street corner. This exhibition is not only looked at, it is felt. And it reminds us that in a world zonked out on the new, art can still cling to what we are in danger of forgetting.
Featuring Image Courtesy: Magic Erase
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