The Enigmatic Image: Curious Subjects in Indian Art

This exhibition explores types and specific examples of visual indirectness encountered in Indian painting and an analogous decorative art object.

While the basic subject of many Indian paintings is clear, many works feature complex subject matter, symbolic nuances, and/or compositional substructures that require an in-depth explanation to understand their layers of meaning and raison d'être. Together, these pictorial intricacies form a corpus of subtextual approaches by artists intended to convey deeper levels of interpretation than are apparent at a superficial glance.

Exhibition overview from the LACMA website