In its debut participation in Art Dubai, 1x1 Art Gallery presents works by six contemporary Indian Artists, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, G Ravinder Reddy, Mithu Sen, Manjunath Kamath, Parul Thacker and Pushpamala N.
Mithu Sen and Chittrovanu Mazumdar, use installation as an experiential medium to explore issues related to individual subjectivity. Sen rides the wave of a developing concern to make art more socially relevant. Her oeuvre of visual art is a keen hybrid of self-reflection and playful expression, marked by a dark sense of humour. Sen’s practice develops from a strong drawing background that has furthered into an expressional vocabulary of her own, which involves multiple media forms like drawing, sculpture, sound, video films, and site specific installations. Varied materials are used as metaphors in her works, where the simple game of life in performance progresses into a poetic evocation of human existence.
Chittrovanu Mazumdar is best known for large scale, multimedia installations and for innovations in developing multisensory aesthetic environments that must be actively navigated by the viewer. Mazumdar’s knowledge of textures and materials comes through in his abundant use of sound, light, videos, photography, paint and other mediums to develop works that refrain from conforming to normative standards of art. His ongoing desire to assemble new ideas into the artistic space urges him to push the boundaries of his own mind and work.
Manjunath Kamath’s consistent concern has been to free the visual story from its verbal equivalents. His works are an eclectic mix of fantasy and reality wherein curious images take birth and read like a story. In this series titled Common Things the artists uses miniature watercolour paintings of everyday objects that he has animated to tell a series of little stories. These linear narratives command attention with wit, playfulness and beauty.
Parul Thacker’s installations play with the idea of surface and depth creating a magical tension between material and form. Translucent monofilament fibers that are twisted, knotted and stitched cradle fiery crystals. The artist uses light much like a draughtsman uses a pen. It defines and articulates her vision and through its manipulation she explores the universe both within and without.
Pushpamala N. formally trained as a sculptor and eventually shifted to photography to explore her interest in narrative figuration. Her work has been described as performance photography, as she frequently uses herself as model in her own work. She uses elements of popular culture in her art to explore place, gender and history. Pushpamala plays with various genres of image-making in her works, resulting in richly layered hybrids with multiple references.
Ravinder Reddy’s female heads are dispassionate and impersonal, however there is a kind of alertness in their expression. Their wide open eyes, bold, rhythmic silhouette, elaborate hair styles, lipstick smeared pursed lips, coiled hair with plastic bands and ribbons stage the relations between memory, history, mythology and contemporary reality, the ironies of modern societies.
