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Amitabh Gandhi
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Amitabh Gandhi is the founder of ARTunderground, a digital art gallery, archive and interaction facility that that has played a pioneering role in encouraging and facilitating contemporary Indian artists to explore the digital idiom. Established in 1997, with its base at Vadodara, ARTunderground focused on New Media Art. In 2001, ARTunderground organized a landmark New Media Art Workshop that saw the participation of 20 eminent contemporary...
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Amitabh Gandhi is the founder of ARTunderground, a digital art gallery, archive and interaction facility that that has played a pioneering role in encouraging and facilitating contemporary Indian artists to explore the digital idiom. Established in 1997, with its base at Vadodara, ARTunderground focused on New Media Art. In 2001, ARTunderground organized a landmark New Media Art Workshop that saw the participation of 20 eminent contemporary artists including Bhupen Khakhar, Dashrath Patel, Gulam Sheikh, Dhruva Mistry, Jyoti Bhatt, Amit Ambalal, Surendran Nair, Nataraj Sharma, Rekha Rodwittiya, Navjot Altaf among others.
Amitabh believes that "the digital medium is the folk art of our millennium." As Amitabh Gandhi said in his ARTunderground manifesto, "ARTunderground is a venture to explore the uncharted domain of digital creativity. Why call it a venture, it’s more close to an adventure!"
Amitabh’s inspiration to start a digital art gallery grew from his own exploration with the computer as a tool for creating a work of art. His digital prints have been exhibited in several prestigious digital-art-prints group shows, which include the exhibition at Sakshi Art Gallery in Mumbai and Bangalore in December 2001 and February 2002 respectively; a group show at the India International Centre, New Delhi in March 2002. He has also exhibited at a group show in the Faculty of Fine Arts that expressed the artist community’s anguish with the 2002 Gujarat riots. Amitabh has also exhibited his works in a digital art show, "Finger Prints" held at the Red Earth ABS Gallery, Vadodara, in November 2006. Amitabh has also done several commissioned artworks for prestigious projects such as the Torrent Research Facility at Bhat, Gandhinagar, and Traffic Island at Gandhinagar for the Jyotigram Yojna. His works are in the collection of collectors in Mumbai, Delhi and Vadodara.
Amitabh’s inquiry in art and design was nurtured in the company of such illustrious painters as Gulammohammad Sheikh and Bhupen Khakkar by virtue of sharing his parental home with them and having the privilege of ‘tea-totaling’ with several leading poets, writers and artists of the 60s.
Amitabh is an avid collector, scavenging the shukravaris and ravivaris, the local Friday and Sunday flea markets for forms that inhabited our past, oleographs, matchbox labels, stamps and other popular graphic art, machine parts, pumps, sewing machines, irons, locks, kettles, old toys, coins, fossils, stones, unusual natural objects and other paraphernalia.
Amitabh Gandhi has traversed myriad paths: a stint at Architecture, at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad; Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and Broadcasting from the St. Xaviers Institute of Mass Communication, Mumbai.
Amitabh brings his eclectic experiences and exposures to his inquiries about the creative process. His interest in the synergy of hand-skills and mind-skills in the development of a work of art and his fascination with the computer as a tool in the creative process led to the establishment of ARTunderground in April 1997. Amitabh pioneered a movement that had few takers in 1997. ARTunderground was a radical idea at a time when artists were skeptical of ‘machine made works’ of art and the desktop revolution was still in its nascent years.
Amitabh is a practicing Graphic Designer having worked with leading advertising agencies in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Vadodara in the capacity of Senior Designer and Art Director. He has several prestigious corporate identity and branding projects to his credit. His clients include corporate and government sector, as also international clients in the US and Europe.
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