Lines of control | Delhi Thapar Gallery's exhibition on A.A. Raiba
An ongoing exhibition of preparatory sketches by the late artist A.A. Raiba at Delhi's Thapar Gallery shows his mastery over form
As a former scientist-in-training, I have always had a thing for graph-paper notebooks; I adore their neatness, their elegance. Moreover, there is a well-documented history of graphs/grids being important preparatory tools for artists and writers. Diego Rivera famously plotted his gigantic murals on graph beforehand, while Thomas Pynchon wrote the first draft of his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow on graph paper. In an ongoing exhibition at Delhi’s Thapar Gallery, one can observe the importance of grids as visual aids in the works of Indian artist Abdul Aziz Raiba (1922-2016). The show, called Master Artist A.A. Raiba: A Unilateral Eclectic, collects a series of preparatory sketches Raiba made for his more famous, large-scale paintings, as well as a series of landscape sketches made by the artist during a Kashmir stint in the late 1950s.