Indian printmakers steal the show at London Original Print Fair

Just six years after she founded India Printmaker House (IPH), Shivangi Ladha is showcasing seven emerging young artists from India and the UK Indian diaspora in one of the core rooms of the prestigious London Original Print Fair (LOPF), held at the historic Somerset House in central London. It is a triumph. This is not only IPH’s first global show, but Ladha believes this is also the first representation of a group of Indian artists at LOPF – which was founded 35 years ago and has shown work from Durer and Rembrandt to Picasso and Hockney.

IPH is a new kind of gallery, founded by Ladha in 2019. For a start, it is not a walk-in space; rather, it is platform nurturing artists who have a passion for printmaking, wherever they live. From its inception, IPH has run the Manorama Young Printmaker Award for artists resident in India; the winner receives a four-week-long residency with materials, printing facilities, and significant exposure of their works.

On preview night at Somerset House, their space was buzzing. Most of the artists were present, happy to chat about their art journey – often via the prestigious London art colleges Central St Martins or Royal College of Art – their work, the ideas conveyed in their prints, and the precision technique required to make a good print.

Rewati Shahani’s family fled Pakistan for Mumbai at partition. “At home, it was always a subject of conversation,” she says. Her prints reflect this, layers of cut paper to make images that are sliced in half to signify borders, or have horizons signifying the sea for migrants either fleeing or arriving to seek refuge. She uses screen-printing “for its clarity”.

Saruha Kilaru takes screen-printing a stage further, out of clarity. Exhibiting her first experiments with fusing it into glass, she explains: “I put powder print onto glass, then put it into the kiln. You can’t control the powder the way you can control a print, anything can happen, even colours change, some disappear!” She’s fine with this. “My work has always been about letting go,” she smiles.

Jaimini Jariwala’s ethereal ‘Threads of House’ pushes patience and technique even further, with exquisite result. Coming from a silk textile heritage, she painstakingly unweaves and reweaves a textile, then photographs it using the early cyanotype process, which exposes light-sensitive paper to UV light to create beautiful monochrome Prussian blue prints.

Both historic and contemporary references fill Ian Malhotra’s seven white-on-black copper-plate etchings of cloud-filled landscapes representing the days of the week. He explains that he’s pitching “the contemporary, binary, hard, linear video game” – hence the white ink on a black ground, imitating the white light on the black background of a computer screen – “against the romantic old techniques.” He cites the 15-16^th century printer Durer, who “commercialised the land by printing exotic landscapes” and skilfully expanded the print market throughout Europe.

For Malhotra, the diaspora is working both ways. Born in Birmingham to Punjabi immigrants, he attended Manchester Art College and then Royal College of Art, but exhibits mostly with Gallery Isa in Mumbai. Why? “Buyers are more confident, there’s more excitement, more intuitive and bold buying,” he reasons. And India is sympathetic to fine craftsmanship. “There is a history of fine handcrafts at all levels, of crafting beautiful objects – textiles, metal, paintings, print. For people like me, who make laborious handcrafted art, there’s a market.”

His words have resonance for Shivangi Ladha, who makes copper plate etchings while leading IPH. The delicacy and different tonalities of her ‘Quiet Water’ print are achieved by multiple dippings into the acid bath, each for a different length of time. “I do every stage myself, start to end, including the editions,” she says.

Each print shown by the IPH collective at LOPF is the result of time-consuming precision patience. Yet, the prices are reasonable. Buying a limited-edition print is a good first step to making your own art collection.