50 years of Pheroza Godrej’s Cymroza is celebrated by all, even other galleries
The Hindu
As the septuagenarian's five-decade journey with art is honoured, the gallerist relives landmark moments and the shows coming up
How do you display 50 years of history? It was a question Pheroza Godrej, renowned gallerist, art historian, and collector, took seriously as the golden jubilee of her brainchild, Cymroza Art Gallery, approached. Five years before D-day (October 20, 2021), she set the ball rolling. “We have a large collection; it’s not streamlined, it’s not coherent, and it covers all the mediums, from oils and works on paper to sculpture, ceramics, photography, lithography, and more. So, to get a grip on it all, we needed discipline — because the paintings and other artworks needed to be looked at, restored, reframed, remounted, as the case may have been,” she explains. From her initial plan of nine exhibitions, she distilled it to three. Pheroza got on board her two main curators: Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania. She also reaped the benefit of the goodwill she has with gallerists across the country. “Dadiba Pundole said ‘I’ll give you Pundole for two weeks’, and Ranjit loved the idea. Then, Chatterjee & Lal said they wanted to do Nelly Sethna’s tapestries exclusively. And the gallery lends itself to it,” she says. The next question was: what would Cymroza do? “They said it should be archival, and I loved the idea.”More Related News