Opening Reception: Sunday 16 November 2025, 6:00 – 9:00 pm at Kumar Gallery, Sainik Farms

In 1959, a year before his tragic death, Sailoz Mookherjea sketched a noble mother with her child on a Kumar Gallery letterhead. He titled it The Dream and gave it to his friend and patron Virendra Kumar, conveying through this gift what Kumar Gallery meant to him and his contemporaries: it was the Dream to be exhibited at and promoted by Kumar Gallery, which was at the center of Indian Modernism during its most vital period.

The Dream of a master artist extends deeper than status and success. It refers to the ineffable aesthetic impulse dwelling in every artist's core—persistent yet nebulous, demanding from them a lifetime of dedicated struggle to give it form. As artists wrest this inner vision into pigment on canvas, they must then engage in an iterative development cycle of presenting artworks in public forums, observing the perceptual and conceptual reactions of viewers, and adapting their style while remaining true to their inner vision. To accelerate this process, Kumar Gallery immersed artists in a crucible of aesthetic exchange amongst diverse global intellectual and cultural elites, while setting exacting standards for innovation within a deliberately competitive atmosphere.

At its best, the iterative process of artistic innovation produces not mere artworks, but Treasures – rare artworks where facets of aesthetic vision find crystalline expression in material form. This exhibition, Treasures of the Masters, presents artworks that embody such crystalline moments where aesthetic dreams are transmuted into Treasures. In them, attentive viewers will see in them glimpses of the inner constitution of each artist’s aesthetic journey. These Treasures are not always iconic works for which these masters became known. Rather, they are anchors of inventiveness that ground an artist’s style and iconicity with meaning. Collectively, the grounding of these anchoring Treasures then acts to shape the flow of art history by radiating ripples of aesthetic insight through the shared fabric of cultural consciousness. We hope this exhibition illumines the transmutation of dreams into Treasures and allows viewers to viscerally feel the vital pulse of Indian Modernism as it radiates from these anchoring points.