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Varying desert themes in rich earthy hues

I look around in surprise. Who is the real Kiran Soni Gupta? Which? Facing me, a modernist abstraction, blue, in broad flat swathes of colour thrown into relief by an unassertive chrome yellow background defining a "Mother and Child" but right across the room from it, stark arboreal shapes in a thick impasto of brown and white, a "Solitude" of leafless trees.

But here is something else again: large, lovingly detailed in the style of Rajasthani miniatures, Radha, Krishna and the cowgirls squirting coloured liquid at each other on Holi and right beside them two miniatures, also exquisitely crafted.

And all around are the faces of Rajasthan: old men in turbans with magnificent moustaches, strong peasant women - some carrying huge pots of water on their heads, belles, and among them some powerful studies like the woman in red in "Fatigue". A mystical mandala entitled "Origin" and a very different arrangement in rich oranges, reds and earth hues which has as much the stamp of the real as the quality of abstraction: "Dunes".

The exhibition is titled "Indian Desert". It is the desert dwellers who dominate. The artist says in conversation that her present focus is social realism. Could this relate to the experiences of her active public life? She is a senior member of the Indian administrative service who had won admission to it after a brilliant academic career. She has risen to the rank of District Collector and Magistrate and is currently Commissioner for Command Area Development and Colonisation, Bikaner.

The latter position must have brought her into close contact with the people whose features and forms have such prominence in this exhibition.

It is a show in which the wide range of themes and styles portrays an active and searching mind with a meticulous concern for craft.

The programme on the opening night included a slide presentation and talk by the artist on the Kumbh Kala 2000 in Bikaner, a massive project bringing together 150 well-known artists like Jatin Das who visited Sri Lanka not so long ago for a week-long artists' camp hosted entirely by the people of Bikaner and organized by the artist - apt evidence of her organizational abilities as much as of her devotion to art.

Prof. Ashley Halpé