At the age of 91, Jyoti Bhatt still works from her Baroda Studio, engaged in painting, analog photography and printmaking. The studio is cool, but alive, is filled with eTched plates, photographic print and a gentle firmly of a lifetime practice.
For more than a month, Through line and lensA historic -precedent curate by contemporary artist and her student Rekha Roadvitia (first Bikner House and now at latitude 28), offered a tribute to the modernist to pay a tribute to the modernist, who has a history as an artist and a teacher. The specialty of decades of work, exhibition, the greatest to date, is a reminder to us that the art keeps our rituals, resistors and everyday texture. And that Bhatt spent recording him throughout his life.
Jyoti Bhatt | Photo Credit: Archer Art Gallery
Knowing the artist
Bhatt’s influence goes deep – how we see patterns, collect everyday, and create art education in India. He did not do this through grand proclamations, but considered the ordinary to be worthy of artistic investigation. His photographic documentation of rural Indian culture was rescued for the same care with the life of postal motifs, murals, and craftsmen.
Born in 1934, he came to age with Nation, studied in Baroda, trained in Naples and New York, and returned to shape a specific Indian visual grammar. Bhatt told about the email, “I was not ready to make political or social statements, but after the continuous shifting socio-cultural scenario, those experiences were naturally seep in my visual language.”
Me, young dream (Cuts) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
As a founding figure of Baroda School, he was not just an artist-he was an institution-fielder, whose teaching and practice said how to learn, and see how to learn generations. This meant that designing the course, which integrates Indian aesthetics with global techniques, encourages interdisciplinary functions, and advises students to develop their voice including rodwitia.
Totaram (Cuts) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Introduction systems
When the painting dominated the modernist imagination, Bhatt turned to printmaking, then considered modest, and made it inexpensive, adverse and destroyer. Later, he took photography with the same care. HeSpend years in creating a visual collection – not only for their work, but also for their peers and communities that they had praised – quietly preserving traditions that were at risk of disappearance.
“Printmaking and photography enabled me to bridge beauty with access,” they say. Both mediums became ways to remember. “Today, with digital technologies, these mediums continue to work as powerful, democratic devices – challenging hierarchies and expanding the boundaries of contemporary Indian art,” they say.
Ardhanrishwar, Venice, 1966 | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
For Bhatt, art and education were inseparable. At Ms. University, Baroda, she helped shape not only artists but also an entire ecosystem of making, thinking and documentation. As a teacher, he had a long and formal career – important dialogues, construction of institutions through collective workshops, and refusing to distinguish art from their social and physical references. Their legacy remains in questions he presented, such equipment passed by him, such as technology, field-based research, and visually coding memory through symbolic motifs in intaglio printmaking.
Artist Parsosh Sen (left) and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri photographed by Bhatt. Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“I found myself documenting my friends and family, my journey and daily meetings, fine art fairs, exhibitions. Finally, photography became a tool for me to see and preserve the rural artistic traditions disappearing in the face of modernity. I believe that personal identity creates collective memory, which is the most bright form in the conversation form.”Jyoti bhattartist
Graphic print and politics
Bhatt’s talent lies in giving real weight to symbolic expansion. He does not just document folk motifs, he enters the conversation with them. He presents them with humor, sharpness and sometimes irony. In a print, a goddess stands next to a consumer logo; In the second, a parrot speaks with close-human mischief.
Tree ,ImaginationCash -1978) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“In graphic prints we see how Bhatt often uses destructive duties as a means by which he deploys his politics, and he criticizes that he belongs to establishments that he considers a retrograde towards pluralism and liberal thinking,” says Rodvitia. She sees it not as a polemic, but as a calm dissatisfaction – is distributed through linework, intelligence and deeply embedded contexts.
“It is an important milestone in both exhibition scale and substance. [But] What makes it really special is a personal investment behind it. I have been collecting Jyoti Bhatt’s printmaking works for years with deep praise and intentions. In addition to some early pieces borrowed from private collections and their collections, approximately 75% of the work on the scene is related to the latitude 28. This exhibition not only makes a tribute to one of the most important modern artists in India, but is also a long -term reflection for their heritage. ,Bhava KakarFounder-director, latitude 28
Kolm forms (Cuts) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Why does he matter
Through his work and teaching, Bhatt reminds us that institutions matter – as an ecosystem of exchange, care and criticism. At a time when the formal study of art is evaluated, and education is reduced in matrix, their life work is a blueprint that can look like a cultural stevardship for a long -looking, long -looking look. For example, his associate efforts to bring rural and urban practices into the same academic frames helped eliminate narrow hierarchies of knowledge.
Bhatt’s print is more than ink on paper – they are maps of how a country can know themselves.
‘Line and lens’ is at 28 latitude till 25 May.
Essayists and teachers write on design and culture.
Published – May 22, 2025 07:47 pm IST