Drents Museum, Assen

RADICAL GAZE: A landmark retrospective in the Netherlands posits Amrita Sher-Gil as a foundational artist of global modernism

Myna Mukherjee, Open The Magazine, May 2026: ‘The exhibition design itself deserves particular praise. Meticulously con­ceived without becoming overbearing, it manages the difficult balance of contextualising Sher-Gil’s life while still allowing the paintings to breathe. Throughout the galleries, the curatorial language remains attentive to atmosphere, memory, and movement rather than relying on spectacle. One of the exhibition’s most elegant gestures is the repeated invocation of South Asian architectural forms through cascading paper-cut jaalis spell­ing out “Amrita” in Devanagari script. These suspended interventions are nei­ther decorative nor literal; they function almost as thresholds between different emotional and geographical worlds that Sher-Gil inhabited. The effect is unexpectedly lyrical—a contemporary design gesture that quietly echoes the layered permeability of Indo-Islamic architecture itself. Equally inventive is the circular radial timeline tracing Sher-Gil’s brief but astonishingly mobile life across Budapest, Paris, Shimla, South India, and Lahore. Rather than presenting biography as linear inevitability, the design suggests orbit, recurrence, and fragmentation, a fitting metaphor for an artist constantly negotiating multiple identities, languages, and aesthetic inheritances.’

In collaboration with: team Drents Museum, Paul Bomers (graphic design), Mudware (production), Riwi Collotype (papercuttings), Frank Hulzebosch 50lux (lighting), Sake Elzinga (photography).

2026