Disintegrating into grains
In the latest group show of works by four upcoming artists Mekhala Bahl, Anjali Deshmukh, Ranu Mukherjee and Shalina Vichitra at Gallery Espace, ‘grain’ has been interpreted as that which makes up material forms. Grain like the atom is seen as a minute, indivisible, omnipresent entity, seen and unseen, in all creations.
Thus all works revolve around materiality in terms of the thematic and the constituent surfaces, both.
This is best demonstrated in the works by Mekhla Bahl who contends that “each work begins with a grain, over and around which my material is splashed, painted, drawn, torn, scratched, mixed”. She uses quilted canvases and printed paper as a base on which punctures and bleeds are created as if to emphasise the pain as well as the fecund power of blood in the creation.
Ranu Mukherjee’s works are pictorially the strongest among the artists, perhaps because she draws on a number of artistic traditions, especially the Japanese in her ink on silk cloth paintings. She deconstructs urban histories in these works, trying to create an emotional response in socio-economic locales transposed onto the imaginative consciousness such as the trading place, where everything becomes a commodity.
Urban landscapes and topographies figure largely in Shalina Vichitra’s work. Shalina uses grid maps, high rises, and dwellings as the vocabulary in her acrylic on canvas works. She has superimposed various types of habitations from slums to houses on a jali or screen through which vignettes of metropolitan life can be witnessed. Different colours of maps, grids, plans mirror varied emotional states.
Anjali Deshmukh delves into the character of the diverse grain, while referring to descriptions of boundaries, freedom and concepts of the ideal. The show is an exploration of the very nature of grain and only obliquely refers to granularity and the tactile and textural quality of material and surface.
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