"Some Icebergs Easy to Avoid" Exhibition
Bose Pacia
This event has ended.
The exhibition navigates the often dicey terrain of the phenomenology of contemporary painting.
Each of the artists explores the questions of "what is painting" through the many modes and incarnations of painting practices in the 20th and 21st centuries. Shobha Broota and Santana Gohain each employ a strong understanding of abstractionist principles within their work. Gohain's paintings are at first stark and monochromatic. Upon closer inspection, however, they are intensely detailed with multiple layers of media and riddled with lines of an intriguing pseudo-text. Broota takes the notion of abstraction into a more sparse and ephemeral realm of atmospheric mark-making and the utilization of non-traditional materials with the necessary painterly tactility.
Alexis Kersey's works are at once both painting and sculpture. By combining two of his established techniques, painting on canvas and inlayed wood "paintings", Kersey creates an object that holds solid ground within the interstitial space between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. Thukral & Tagra's Artificial Strawberry Flavor takes us one step further into the territory of dimensionality in painting. This sculpture/painting work utilizes re-fabricated commercial objects as the ground for painting miniature photorealistic portraits of young Sardarji men in Delhi.
In a similar way to Thukral & Tagra's usage of commercial objects, Kirann Telkar's paintings depict phantasmagorically transformed soda bottles. The work takes on the question of consumerism through the lens of a surrealist approach to semi-representational painting. And to take this question of the phenomenology of painting in contemporary art to an end we have Jayanta Roy. Roy's work puts forward a mixed media tromp l'oeil collage of newsprint.
From abstraction to photorealism and mixed media objects Some Icebergs Easy to Avoid begs the question of what constitutes a contemporary painting practice.
[Image: Jayanta Roy "Untitled (Wrapped the Canvas II)" (2008) mixed media on canvas, 60 x 72 in.]
Media
Schedule
from February 13, 2009 to March 07, 2009