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 Purushottam Public Trust awarded its Annual Merit Scholarship for the year 2023 to Digvijaysinh Jadeja.
2019 B.V.A in Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts
MSU Baroda 2021 M.V.A in Printmaking, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda
Born in Bhavnagar, Gujarat in 1999, Jadeja’s work is grounded in the richly textured terrain of human emotions. With a formal training in painting and printmaking from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he moves fluidly between mediums – woodcut, lithography, oil, graphite – crafting imagery that feels at once intimate and disorienting.
In this exhibition, those shifts in medium echoed the thematic contrasts he so often navigates: between past and present, real and imagined, the seen and the deeply felt. His figures – vague, distorted, hovering, seem to emerge from memory itself. They are not portraits in the traditional sense but placeholders for feeling. In one work, a soft, dreamlike figure stands in a loosely rendered interior; in another, a wide landscape stretches out, not geographic but psychological in nature. His compositions reflect a deep interest in how stories, both personal and shared, leave impressions that blur the boundary between what happened and what is recalled.
This concern with memory and perception was heightened during Jadeja’s MacDowell
Fellowship in 2024, where he created large-scale color woodcuts based on his observations from daily life there.
Jadeja’s work has garnered significant recognition, from the Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship early in his academic journey, to the Hyundai India Art for Hope grant, the CCRT Young Artist Scholarship, and multiple awards for excellence in printmaking. These accolades reflect not just technical skill but a distinctive voice, one that remains curious about the human condition and unafraid to dwell in ambiguity.
Click HERE to download his resume.