By Philip Mathew

Bengaluru: The Salesian Missionaries of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) Provincialate has opened a Christian art gallery in Bengaluru on June 14.

This is among the few art galleries the congregation has opened in India.

SMMI provincial Sr Aline says the Bengaluru gallery is the result of several years of planning and discussions by her sisters.

The gallery displays some 650 painting of Sr Genevieve De Cordou and Sr Marie Claire, two globally renowned SMMI artists. The two have thousands of paintings on Christian themes.

Hundreds of people, including teachers and students attended the gallery opening function at the SMMI’s St Mary’s Convent.

Francoise Gautier, consul general of France, Monseigneur C Francis, vicar general of the Arch-diocese of Bangalore, Father Faustine Lobo, director, Pontifical Society, and Ramesh Tredal, an art director, spoke on the occasion.

Sr Prema Jose, one of the organizers, told Matters India that the gallery covers an area of 1,800 square feet.

Monseigneur Francis told the gathering that through paintings displayed in gallery will keep alive the memories of the two artists.

Sister Genevieve was born in 1919 in France. After her art studies in Paris, she came to India and joined the SMMI in Bengaluru. She worked as an art teacher and head mistress of the school run by the SMMI in Benaluru. Though French by birth, she lived and died in India in 1995 as an Indian by choice of religious vocation, the priest said.

The SMMI provincial hailed the French Sister as a pioneer and trend setter for the ethnic portrayal and interpretation of Christ through Indian art.

She took the advice of the Jesuit Father Henry Heras a historian and a lover of Indian art, to experiment with a new Indian style of painting to depict Christ and Christianity.

“Sr Genevieve’s greatness lies in her adaptability to indigenous artistic individuality and in the display of color symbolisms that she brought out in her paintings using just ordinary enamel paints,” the provincial added.

Sr Claire, 80 has produced more than 2,000 Christian paintings. She loved silence and her paintings are the result of her silence and deep meditation. She believed that God is the greatest artist and she is only a miniature of that artist. “Sr Claire deliberately avoids the classical style of strokes, cubic and other modern and western techniques and employs the line structure indicative of Indian art,” the provincial said.

She has painted themes such as the Last Supper, Crucifixion and Christmas in an Indian setting using Indian symbols, motifs and images.

Sister Aline says the art gallery is her congregation’s great contribution to promote Indian Christian art. “Sustaining the art gallery is going to be a big challenge,” told the Matters India. She hopes that support will come from the Church, Christian art lovers and people concerned with art.