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| Promising Artist Award has been instituted by India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, in collaboration with Art India Magazine, a leading non-academic publication on modern art in the country. The aim of the award is to encourage and give a platform to promising young artists while facilitating a closer public engagement with developments in contemporary Indian art. |
| In 2005, George Martin, a Kerala-born sculptor, received the first Promising Artist Award. The award went to Shiv Kumar Verma in the year 2006. The winners of the award in the year 2007 were Baptist Coelho and Chinmoy Pramanick. This was followed by Ashish Ghosh in 2008. |
| Charmi Gada Shah has been declared winner of the Promising Artist Award for the year 2009. Born in Mumbai and trained in Design and Technology at Garodia International School, Mumbai; Charmi is 29 years old. The Centre to her work is the intimate experience of a place: experiences which are often constructed as exquisitely sculptural models that explore place, scale and site-specificity. As the lingering experiences of built environment and non-spectacular places become the subject of her artistic production, they come into sight, become visible and sharpen the senses for the perception of times, traces and the dynamics of social space. For example, the ruined places, the cracks on the wall, weathered staircases and traces which the past has left behind. These memories inspire and inform the vocabulary of her work. She often creates replicas of such places in various materials and arrange them as site-specific installations or photograph them. The photographs have a very unsettling quality, a wonderment of the real thing and are in constant dialogue between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. |
| The winner, Charmi will be given a citation and
winning amount of Rs. 1,50, 000 and her works along with those by the
short-listed artists will be exhibited at the Visual Arts Gallery, India
Habitat Centre, New Delhi.
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