They are only in their 20s and there’s a freshness and sassiness in their art.

The innovative work of L.N. Tallur, Kriti Arora and Praneet Soi was shown recently at galleries in New York. Adarsh Alphons, whose work was on display at the Indian Consulate in mid June, is even younger, just 14 years old!

Kriti Arora’s sculptures are created out of dough, kneaded like rotis in the age-old way. Yet what emerges are dramatic, charred mosques and temples, a commentary on the undercurrents in Indian life. Arora, 26, is a young artist from Delhi who has just completed her MFA in ceramics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with the help of a teaching grant.

As a student at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, Arora had participated in the Art Today Emerging artists show, and in several exhibitions in Amherst. Arora, who was awarded a teaching grant at Amherst, created for her thesis piece an installation called Mandir Masjid that echoed the trauma of partition.

Since both her refugee grandparents had been cloth merchants, she took 300 yards of fabric, and placed her scarred clay temples and mosques on them on a bed of ashes, while archival footage from 1947 flickered on the wall. While the process of making these structures is not unlike kneading roti dough, she pit-fires them to give them a darkened, ruined look in a method that recalls the making of kohl or "kaajal" for the eyes.

What is particularly appealing about Arora’s creative process is the way she combines traditional "woman’s work" in very non-traditional ways, making a statement about gender issues. Her surreal photographs underscore a patriarchal society with images of today’s women merging with their doe-eyed Mughal counterparts. She achieves this in a truly idiosyncratic way: she poses herself in front of a mirror while a colleague projects a slide of a Shahjahani courtesan on her face and shoots the picture.

Arora then develops the negatives and washes the images in the bathtub, wringing them like so much laundry — the result is a wrinkled, slightly warped image. Or she runs them through her sewing machine, without using a needle, and the perforations that emerge give them a hand-made look. Since she saw the women of the house sewing, cooking, washing and pickling all day, she says with a twinkle in her eye, "It all comes very naturally to me."

Praneet Kumar Soi, 28, is an artist who completed his MFA in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, making the dean’s list. He is currently doing his MFA in painting on a full scholarship at the University of California at San Diego. He uses the most unusual canvas for his paintings — empty cardboard trays from inside cigarette packets. These become the canvases for his paintings, a tiny tale of turmoil told on a 3" by 2" rectangle of cardboard.

Soi has exhibited his work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta and at the Lalit Kala Academy in New Delhi in the Sahmat Group Show. As a visualizer for Chaitra Leo Burnet, he was part of the team that created the Coca-Cola campaign in India. Soi uses the tiny trays and covers of Indian cigarette packages to create autobiographical tales of life in the big cities. While the Mughal and Rajasthani miniatures chronicled wars and durbars and musical soirees, Praneet Soi’s miniatures are about love and loss, about life in a changing India.

Soi’s tiny paintings reflect the influences of just about everything from the Dadaist and Pop movements to mass media to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rushdie. The discarded cigarette packet canvas is uniquely his own: "The paper was of excellent quality, interesting in format and lent itself well to this change in status."

The paintings are intricate, with layering in gouache, lacquer and oil paints. While traditional miniatures were institutionalized court art, they were also important social and political documentaries of that era. Soi’s miniatures attempt to speak in similar fashion about contemporary concerns but merge fact and fantasy.

Observes Soi, "If there seemed to be something absurd in creating an intricate painting on a surface that was essentially mass produced and destined to be discarded, there was also the absurdity in creating a work that while striving to be contemporary in nature used archaic means of representation to do so."

The paths of the two artists from Baroda crossed in New York where art dealer and gallery owner Abraham Joel showcased their work at the A Gallery in Chelsea. "Traditions and Innovations" offered refreshing new perspectives.

According to Joel, both the artists’ work has received a lot of interest. Soi’s miniatures are selling for $300 and several have been sold to individual buyers. Kriti Arora’s misshapen mosques and temples have proven hot sellers; five sold on the very first day at prices ranging from $300 to $1,000.

Alphons started painting at the age of three, and over the years his work has matured far beyond his years. His work has received acclaim in leading Indian magazines and newspapers and been praised by artists like Anjali Ela Menon. He works mostly in oils and acrylic but also in crayons and ink. While some paintings seem derivative, such as his portraits of Mother Teresa, echoing the work of M.F. Husain, a lot of his works do resound with his own unique voice, such as Kosovo, Sanctum or Winged Words.

The young artist takes on many issues in his works from poverty to race and gender, and even war and peace. What is truly wonderful about his work is his sophisticated color orchestration, worthy of a much more experienced artist. The vivid shades really make his work come alive, and he is definitely an artist to watch over the coming years.

While some works of art hit you with a visual immediacy, others are unfolding stories, many layered offerings which have to be savored and mulled over, like a glass of fine wine. Like L.N. Tallur’s interactive art objects, wooden boxes that reveal worlds within worlds, often tongue in cheek.

As Jane Farver noted, "The scale of the works is really quite wonderful and you have to be seated to participate in them, venture into them and open them up. The work is really both out of his imagination and out of his everyday life, a remarkable combination of materials and ideas."

"Export Design" is a mixed media work, so small that you have to crouch in front of it and by necessity you have to get intimate with the art. The wooden box is painted and varnished to look like a metal container, and as you open it, you unravel it, open compartments and turn pages and do the unfolding. First you see an ethereal butterfly impaled and a piece of fur on the open lid, a packaging format common to museums of natural history. You turn a page and the butterfly opens into an anatomical drawing of human kidneys — and you realize that all these delicate and coveted items are exported to the world by India.

Arani Bose of Bose Pacia Modern observes: "Tallur’s is a very raw and emotional representation, the very quintessence of conceptual art. His work is intellectually powerful yet maintains all the emotional and human qualities you would expect to find in art coming out of India."

This mix of the prosaic and the profound comes from Tallur’s own childhood as the son of a sales tax officer who found time to act in Yakshaghana, a folk dance of Karnataka, and a mother who in her housebound chores still managed to create colorful embroideries. Tallur himself was attracted to the design of everyday items like matchbox covers and magazine pictures and attributes the assemblage quality of his work to his yen for collecting these odds and ends.

He pursued his BFA at Mysore University, and then lived and worked in Cholamandal Artist’s Village on scholarship. In 1995 he went to the Baroda School of Art to study painting but instead was awarded a scholarship to study Museology. This detour, in fact, helped him to forge a new direction for his art: "It’s a systematic method of presentation and my recent work evolved from that museum background. The idea came from science museums, which use participatory material to convince people of any complex ideas."

According to Bose, the young artist’s visit, his first to the United States, served dual purposes — to expose the New York art community to his unique take on conceptual art, and to expose him in turn to the energy and vibrancy of New York’s art world. Currently Tallur is visiting various museums and absorbing the rhythms of life in the west. He observed, "For the first time I saw originals by Picasso and Matisse and it’s a totally different feeling — there’s a directness and an honesty which you cannot grasp from reproductions."

On his return to India, Tallur will be starting on his next project, "Fast Modern," an ambitious multi-sensory undertaking which he is planning for the year 2000. He had received an Inlaks grant for his earlier work and will be looking for funding for this project. While "Past Modern" came wrapped in minimalist boxes whose contents were inscrutable till you opened them, "Fast Modern" uses very recognizable items of daily life — such as refrigerators and television sets — as its canvas.