Wendt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of their new exhibition Vanishing Spirits on view from September 8th through September 17th, 2010. The exhibition will be open for public viewing Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. Vanishing Spirits is lead by a strong team including Exhibition Curator, Priyanka Mathew of Sotheby’s; Exhibition Director, Karen Stone Talwar; Director of Sales, Payal S. Parekh and Director of Marketing, Neil Ghosh. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Salaam Baalak Trust, founded by philanthropist and filmmaker Mira Nair.

Joseph and Serina Manqueros of Wendt Gallery will host a private reception on Wednesday, September 8th, from 6 to 8 pm. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served. If you would like to attend or would like more information, please phone 212-838-8818, or email [email protected] Please RSVP if you wish to attend. To view the exhibition online, please visit our website at – www.wendtgallery.com.

There is a rich tradition of Indian photographers who continue to provide a vessel to catalog the constant decimation and regeneration of this great landscape. Vanishing Spirits is an exhibition of photographs that brings together the work of three photographers; Pablo Bartholomew, Prabir Purkayastha and Amita Talwar; as they capture rare and dissipating modes of existence in the country. The artists isolate and draw upon social conditions and transforming landscapes – freezing in time studies of social constructs that make up India.

Prabir Purkayastha has spent almost two decades traveling through preciously disappearing areas of India, from the wilderness of Ladakh and Pushkar to the marginal communities in Bengal and Assam. Vanishing Spirits presents a subset of rare images that captures some of these remote and magical places.

Looking Upward spirits the values of traditional India. Purkayastha dims the background, spotlighting the figure in the heart of the picture. A man stands in the center of the photograph with his hands stretched outward reaching for the radiant light that descends down on him. He is not only embraced by this overwhelming presence of a higher being but in fact longs for it.

Pablo Bartholomew comes from Indian photography blue blood. His father Richard Bartholomew was an art critic and a photographer who captured some of the most amazing pictorials around the most celebrated community of Indian artists in time shortly after independence. Influenced by his father’s work, Bartholomew’s photographs pulsate with the energy of the urban in India. Mumbai is a particular muse to Bartholomew and continuing in this effort to explore transforming spaces, the exhibition presents a set of his photographs that provides a lens into a fading community of Parsis in Mumbai who at one time were a vital part of milieu of the city.

Rag Pickers demonstrates the clash of a transitioning culture in some of India’s major developing Mecca’s. Revealing the conflict between the past and present colliding into one another as they transition and evolve into their own version of modern society. The artist captures a nomadic family walking towards the metropolis. The viewer is imbued with the concept that these nomads are simultaneously walking away from their past as they walk towards their unknown.

Amita Talwar’s photographs allow us the opportunity to take a step back for a broader brushstroke. They give us an expansive collection of images across the country of quiet and spiritual places.

Woman at the Door depicts inanimate objects, such as a door and window melding with colors and patterns in the subject’s dress, creating a union of the usual with the unusual, the old with the new, the ancient with the modern, seemingly strewn together to exist cohesively in an uncertain state of human transition. Through her use of symbolism, she demonstrates to the viewer how civilization imprints its DNA for generations to come. These life impressions, whether in architecture, clothing, art, or patterns, stand as beacons of the ancient way of life.

Vanishing Spirits concludes its survey with additional works by these artists including landscapes, figures, and urban scenes.

Wendt Gallery hopes to bring a greater awareness of the influence that contemporary art plays in today’s global and shifting societies.

Written by Serina Manqueros, Curator, Wendt Gallery