Return of the Husain Saga

The late M.F. Husain returns to Venice in Biennale season with an exhibition of paintings and a high-tech immersive video experience that animates his legacy

- Kai Jabir Friese in Venice

 

I DON’T THINK HUSAIN TOOK ME SERIOUSLY,” SAYS KIRAN NADAR, recounting a favourite anecdote about how hard she had to pursue India’s most famous artist back in the day. He did eventually produce some paintings for her new house in Delhi, in the late 1980s, but Nadar, now arguably the most prominent collector and patron of Indian modernist art, was speaking at the vernissage (or preview), last month, of a new exhibition, in the front hall of a heritage building—an old salt warehouse in Venice, the Magazzini del Sale—surrounded by a compact and priceless array of (mostly) early works by Husain. In the cavernous main hall behind the paintings is a newly commissioned ‘immersive’ installation, a 40-minute-long experience based on the artist’s life and work, produced by Visioni, the Italian creative firm that ignited the international craze for ‘immersive’ art shows with a van Gogh exhibit that has toured the globe. Kiran Nadar clearly takes M.F. Husain very seriously.