While Indian art history has long celebrated its painters, sculptors and modernist masters, the rich and nuanced tradition of printmaking often remains overshadowed. While a few names may have found recognition, many remain unappreciated. This piece seeks to spotlight these artists and their contribution to the evolution of Indian visual culture and the enduring relevance of printmaking in contemporary practice.
Jeram Patel
Jeram Patel studied Drawing and Painting at Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay (1950–55), and later pursued Typography and Publicity Design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (1957–59). He was one of the twelve founding members of the avant-garde collective Group 1890, which sought to break away from traditional artistic norms in India. His visual language was rooted in abstraction, often stripping the image down to its most essential forms to create a powerful and evocative expression. He is best known for his black-and-white ink drawings and his innovative works using blowtorch and burnt wood. Drawing remained central to Patel’s practice throughout his life, and his work was widely exhibited both in India and internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963 and 1977. He received multiple accolades, including the Lalit Kala Akademi’s National Award in 1957, 1963, 1973, and 1984, as well as the National Award for Design in 1976. Notably, a large number of his works remain untitled reflecting his belief that the material itself should communicate directly, free from imposed interpretation or categorization. Jeram Patel passed away in Vadodara on 18 January 2016, leaving behind a deeply influential and uncompromising body of work.
Rini Dhumal
Trained initially as a printmaker at Santiniketan under the guidance of Professor Somnath Hore, Rini later continued her studies at M.S. University, Baroda, and then at the prestigious Atelier 17 in Paris, under Stanley William Hayter. Her time in Paris was transformative, equipping her with a rich vocabulary of techniques including viscosity printing, which became central to her later works. The central theme of Rini Dhumal’s work revolved around the enduring power and resilience of women. Much of her artistic practice was rooted in printmaking, a medium she not only mastered but also expanded creatively. She used printmaking not only as a tool for technical innovation but as a deeply personal language to explore womanhood, mythology, and the everyday with rare sensitivity and strength. Rini believed that any technique could become expressive when the artist uses colour, line, and psychological depth to their full potential.
“The role of a printmaker is two-fold. It requires a disciplined exactitude and a sense of aesthetic beauty. It is most important that a print communicates its message clearly and is accessible to everyone.”
Zarina Hashmi
Best known for her work in printmaking, Zarina Hashmi preferred carving over drawing, gouging the surface rather than building upon it embracing a tactile, subtractive approach to mark-making. Throughout her career, she explored a wide range of printmaking techniques, including intaglio, woodblock, lithography, and silkscreen. Often working in series, she used repetition to reflect on the multiplicity of places, identities, and ideas. Zarina’s practice was deeply rooted in the themes of home, memory, and displacement concepts shaped by her personal experiences and the political history of South Asia. The Partition of India in 1947 left a lasting impression on her, informing much of her exploration of identity, belonging, and loss. As both a printmaker and paper sculptor, she crafted minimalist yet deeply emotional works that spoke to the universal longing for a place of one’s own.
Nasreen Mohamedi
Nasreen Mohamedi is celebrated for her minimalist and abstract drawings, as well as her experiments in printmaking, particularly in lithography and screen printing. Her print works, much like her drawings, reflect a restrained aesthetic rooted in geometry, grids, and precise linear forms. Her work explored themes of selfhood, negation, and consciousness, often reflecting an attempt to separate the self from the “thinking” self. Her use of line was both deliberate and sensuous, drawing connections to geometry, music theory, and patterns found in nature such as the stillness of air or the rhythms of space, a sentiment that captures the essence of her artistic and philosophical orientation. Nasreen Mohamedi’s work stands as a singular example of a phenomenological approach to abstraction, one that is deeply rooted in experience, perception, and the poetics of line.
Benode Behari Mukherjee
Binod Behari Mukherjee was a deeply introspective artist who engaged with a wide array of printmaking techniques, including woodcuts, drypoints, lithographs, paper cuts, and textile block prints. His experimentation across these mediums reflected his commitment to exploring form, texture, and material as extensions of thought and perception. Mukherjee moved away from the overt mythological symbolism often associated with Indian art and instead chose to focus on the subtleties of everyday life, its gestures, routines, and fleeting moments and capturing them with poetic sensitivity. His works often carried an understated lyricism, where line, negative space, and minimal mark-making evoked depth beyond the visible. Even after losing his eyesight later in life, Mukherjee continued to create, teach, and influence generations of artists. His printmaking, much like his murals and drawings, is marked by restraint, clarity, and an inner vision that transcended physical limitation, affirming his place as one of India’s most quietly revolutionary modernists.
K.G Subramanyan
K.G. Subramanyan was a prolific modernist whose artistic vision seamlessly merged traditional Indian visual culture with contemporary modes of expression. His experiments in woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs, and serigraphs were not merely technical ventures but deeply reflective exercises that explored narrative, satire, and social critique through layered visuals. For Subramanyan, printmaking offered a democratic medium reproducible, accessible, and rich in visual possibilities. He embraced its graphic clarity and rhythmic potential, often infusing his prints with motifs drawn from folk art, mythology, and everyday life. In printmaking, he found not only a vehicle for multiplicity but also a ground for invention, where the act of making remained inseparable from the act of thinking.
He once noted that “an artist’s expression cannot be limited to the canvas, it must find form wherever it is needed.”
In revisiting these works, we uncover not just forgotten names but forgotten narratives of experimentation, resistance, and quite mastery. Recognizing their contributions is essential not only to broaden our understanding of Indian art history, but to honor the depth and diversity that printmaking continues to offer within contemporary practice.
Featuring Image Courtesy: The Hindu
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