Ankon Mitra, currently showing at the Japan Foundation, to be moved later to Art Centrix Space, comes through as a phenomenal Origami artist, one with a difference if ever there was one.

An architect and landscape artist by training and a practitioner of Origami, the traditional art of creating figures by folding paper, as vocation and obsession, the artist seems to translate everything he observes, feels and believes into an Origami experience.

Forms and figures seem to pop up and dance in his mind&’s eye no sooner he beholds a situation, from sun to sand, sea to sky, indeed from chink to armour, and the light that might hide and peep between the crevices. 

The remarkable aspect of Ankon&’s work as of now are his interpretation of situations, enriched in his fertile imagination, where a peacock bursts into dance with the rising sun, in defiance of nature; a cow and calf get silently exploited by human selfishness in the garb of devoted/political protection; where dancing dervishes get transformed into lyrical swirls of metal modelled on paper craft; and where spirituality stands transformed into a series of meaningfully loaded aluminium images based on origami forms, informed by India&’s ancient wisdom. 

The exhibition breaks the conventional notion of the art of Origami possible in its truest sense only with paper and paper-like material. Pushing the boundaries of this ancient craft, the exhibition showcases folding and folding derived works in aluminum, stainless steel, brass, paper board, leather, fabric, wood and even ceramic. 

This body of work is a collective effort of architect and origami artist Ankon Mitra and his Studio, Hexagramm Design PL. Ankon is fully dedicated to the magic of folding, experimenting with a thousand different ways of folding, applying them to as many different kinds of material as may be observed in nature. With a lot of technology and software also harnessed in his studio, combined with the basic principle of folding paper prototypes by hand, Ankon has sought to reinvent this ancient art of Origami as a new three dimensional creative vocabulary of great beauty and immense aesthetic, expressive and decorative potentials, the likes of which as yet rare in this medium. 

Not only does the artist philosophise and ruminate through his art, but adapts some such forms into decorative utilitarian objects as well, affording the connoisseur to live with the creations, making them to that extent interactive. 

Says curator Monica Jain, “We bring together Origami as pure art, as light installations, as experimental prototypes and functional art forms that have been created between 2014 and 2016.” As a curator Jain&’s efforts have come through as serious and earnest, with concern and feeling for what she is doing, and artists she is dealing with — seeking out fresh talent and lending them a platform, with sympathy and understanding. There is usually an effort discernable behind each show she puts together, not yet liable to shortcuts taken by most of our so-called curators, putting together a hundred works by 80 artists under one roof with a 30 per cent cut settled upon!