The Purushottam Public Trust Scholarships
SCHOLARSHIPS
As an important form of Contemporary and Modern Art, Graphic Printmaking is unique and exhaustive, expensive and laborious to practice. The Purushottam Annual Merit Award for Printmaking encourages artists to continue this art form through monetary support as well as offering a platform for them to showcase their work. We hope to play a small role by helping talented budding artists, especially print-makers. The core objective is to provide initial momentum to a deserving artist as he/she leaves the cocooned existence of a university and embarks on a professional journey.
One of the main initiatives of the Trust is, therefore, to offer scholarships to new talent in the filed of print making, and we offer scholarships and a platform for exposure to them.
In alignment with this, every year, since 2014, the Purushottam Public Trust has awarded an annual merit award to a student in the field of print-making.
This is executed under the aegis of the Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts and the Head of the Department of Graphics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat - the premier institution of contemporary Indian art in the country. This annual merit award is conferred on the student securing highest marks in the final examinations of the Graphic Arts Course (Practical). The awardee receives a monetary award of Rupees One Lac, as well as the opportunity to showcase his/her works at the end of the year at a premier art gallery in Vadodara.
The Purshottam Public Trust awarded its Annual Merit Scholarship for the year 2021 to Asavari Gurav.
"I animate the space around me with whatever resources at hand. These could be words or paint or through incorporating the performative (act). I’m interested in an automated improvisation and construction of images, drawn from memory and myown subjective associations with immediate surroundings.
I have worked on Artist books, Paintings, Prints, Drawings, and theatrical-performance pieces.
Drawing and re-drawing, washes and erasures, juxtaposing images layered with color, and a playful approach is fundamental to my process of making.The works are philosophical inquires drawn from various literary sources, Goan Jazz songs, myth, culture, history, folklore, Theatre and Performance writings, Existentialism, and magical realism. Writing is the root to my visual language and performances. The image and text embody themselves as motifs and symbols.
My works have myriad characters, imagined (mechanical and organic) creatures, androgynous actors, masks and women as protagonists. There are reference to stories about women, retelling them in context to space and time. Women are portrayed exploring various thematic concerns in context to love, desire, body,morality, Futuristic allegories, sci-fi,nature, the urban,and the socio-political turmoil.
Action and the ephemeral journey of the body through various terrains are captured in the floating paradigms of the compositions. Observations and factsevolve in a dreamlike space into fiction. They are most often a critical satire- a cold carnival of humorous interpretations.
In search for identity, I seek to unravel the intuitive forms and images which furtherarchives various aspects of the ‘performative’. My work fundamentally asks questions about the human condition and the complexity of the narrative grows in response to the changing world."
Click HERE to download her resume.
