Rini Dhumal

Rini Dhumal (16 December 1948 – 7 September 2021) was an Indian painter and printmaker known for figurative work centred on the female form, drawing on mythology, memory and the experience of Partition. She taught for nearly two decades at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao (M.S.) University of Baroda in Vadodara, Gujarat, eventually heading its Painting Department, and is credited with helping bring printmaking into wider recognition within Indian contemporary art..

Early life

Dhumal, born Rini Dasgupta, was born on 16 December 1948 in Rangpur, then in East Bengal and now in Bangladesh, a year after the Partition of India. Journalist Anil Dharker has written that the displacement of Partition shaped the recurring sense of alienation in her later work.

Education

Dhumal completed her schooling at St. Anthony's Convent, Mumbai, in 1964, and studied art and literature for a year at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, before earning her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda (1966–1972), receiving the Chancellor's Gold Medal for her M.F.A. In 1973 she received a Government of India Cultural Scholarship to train under K. G. Subramanyan and Somnath Hore at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. Her best-known body of work is the Devi series, alongside others including Shakti, Tales of the Prophetess, Rooted Landscapes and Wounds. Beyond painting and printmaking, she worked in ceramics, textiles, glass and bronze. A retrospective, Shakti, opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, in May 2022, having been delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic and mounted posthumously following her death.

Art historian Ratan Parimoo, in a 1993 essay on the Faculty of Fine Arts published in the catalogue Trends & Images by the Centre of International Modern Art (CIMA), Calcutta, placed Dhumal among the artists of the Baroda Group, describing her at the time as a younger teacher of printmaking at the university who was also notable as a painter, citing the freedom of outline and brushwork in her figurative compositions.

Personal life

Dhumal married fellow artist and printmaker Purushottam Dhumal after her return from Paris; the two were already both listed as Baroda-based printmakers, then unmarried, in a 1974 survey of the city's art scene. Her daughter, Radhika Dhumal, is an architect and conservator of historic buildings. Governor's Gold Medal, Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata (1974) National Award, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (1988) , Drawn to Life – Sketchbooks of Rini Dhumal (2014) , and Parallel Wings – The Art of Rini Dhumal (2020)