Artist and designer focused marketplace PosterGully holds first exhibition

Tuesday July 28, 2015 , 4 min Read

An artwork depicting a greyhaired bespectacled old man dressed in 1970s semi-urban style staring at a lifesize picture of Bollywood's Amrish Puri was included in the first exhibition by ecommerce startup Postergully in New Delhi.

The recent showcase by the startup, a curated marketplace for artists and designers, contained 46 pieces of art created by over 500 creative brains working with it.

"Every morning we wake up, do our duties and we go along our way. While we do, the cosmos is morphing into something inexplicable; something niche. The world is morphing into completely new genre in every passing second. We define such a transient phenomenon as art!," says organisers.

Founded by Bharat Sethi in 2013, PosterGully enables artists, designers and anyone who holds original visual content to seamlessly contribute and merchandise unique designs in a variety of products, such as phone cases, art prints, home decor, clothing etc. to consumers globally.

Artists need not give up the rights to their work. "Every artist is a story teller; every art work is a story from an auspices of his or her on mind," says Inderpreet Singh, creative head, PosterGully. At their first art exhibition at Okhla industrial area in New Delhi, titled "See Saw", offered a peek into the fare offered on the site.

Potraits from personalites ranging from Bollywood and Hollywood to English TV serials besides the music world and a range of abstract prints were showcased. One such print depicted the luminous beauty of Madhubala, depicted with big black earrings and glowing red lips juxtapposed with stormtrooper droids from "Star Wars" film sporting a caption - "These aren't the droids you are looking for."

On the website contributor artists and designers upload their work, which is made available for consumers, who are free to pick-and-print the art on the available merchandise on the same website. Unique paintings, sketches or design artworks are printed on a variety of products such as phone cases, home decor items, clothing etc and sold to interested buyers, produced on demand by national vendors assisted via an API based automated process.

"The underlying idea behind PosterGully was to be at the helm of an emerging movement to find individualised, curated shopping experiences and churning out products supported by communities with like-minded interests," says Bharat Sethi, founder, PosterGully.

"The company is currently helping about 850 contributors to cast on their artworks who have contributed over 8000 designs and half a lakh products. Our live showcasing would help us penetrate better," says Sethi.

The portal helps artists and designers to upload their original designs on the website, which takes care of manufacturing the goods and selling them based on demand. Many artists like Prashanth from Roorkee, Prathyaksh and Siladitya from Delhi, say they got in touch with the website while they were in search for a platform to express themselves.

"My picture displayed here is a part of the series of 'alien versions'. There are Indian versions and international versions as well. My picture is an alien version of the Beetles. There are other International versions like Frida Kalho, Lenin, etc. In the Indian version there is Ganesh avatars of alien, Krishna avatars of alien, etc.," says Charpak Dipa, a professional artist from West Bengal, who completed his alien version of the Beetles in just six hours.

Raj Karan, a Delhi based filmmaker says,"This exhibition was more on the digital terms, than the real terms. I make films on the real lives, it's really a new thing to me. It's wonderful to see young people coming in and young platform being created for different kind of artists to come together." Artistic expressions depicting characters in Hollywood movies "Men in Black," "Darth Vader", "The Grim Reaper," "The Matrix" "Joker" and "Batman" besides James Bond films were depicted in the exhibition.

Image Credit : Shutterstock