Jivya Soma Mashe
Hervé Perdriolle
Abandoned by his family at a young age, Jivya Soma Mashe took refuge in drawing and embraced the pictorial traditions of his community, later going on to develop a personal style that would earn him the admiration first of his loved ones, then that of regional, national and international authorities.
His work earned him a National Award, presented by Indira Gandhi in 1976. Jivya Soma Mashe’s paintings were exhibited for the first time at Mumbai’s historic Chemould Gallery in 1975. A number of them feature in the famous catalogue of the Centre Pompidou’s Magiciens de la terre exhibition in 1989, while others were shown in the Fondation Cartier’s thirtieth anniversary exhibition in 2014. Some of his large paintings will be on display in the inaugural exhibition at the Fondation Cartier’s new premises, opposite the Louvre Museum, from the end of October 2025.
Hervé Perdriolle is an art critic and exhibition curator. He launched the first exhibitions in France of the Figuration Libre movement (Blanchard, Boisrond, Combas, Di Rosa, Viollet) and their American counterparts (Basquiat, Haring, Scharf). Hervé Perdriolle lived in India from 1996 to 1999, and since then his passion for contemporary Indian art in all its diversity has been evident in the numerous exhibitions he has organised.