Prabhavathi Meppayil Exhibition

Pace Gallery (537 W 24th St.)

This event has ended.

Pace Gallery presents Prabhavathi Meppayil’s first solo exhibition in North America. The exhibition will feature a new body of work continuing Meppayil’s engagement of global legacies of modernism and Minimalism through artisan techniques.

Meppayil begins her work by creating heavily layered fields of white gesso. For this exhibition, her work then falls into two groups: in the first, she embeds these gesso fields with thin copper and gold wires in linear arrangements. The wires lend both a material and chromatic quality to the work, interacting with ambient light and transforming in texture and tone as the wires oxidize. In the second group of work, Meppayil marks the gesso with repeated incisions made by a thinnam, a tool traditionally used by goldsmiths to imprint bangles with ornamental patterns. Her new work reveals a heightened attention to musicality and rhythm. Engaging with seriality through triptychs and diptychs, she emphasizes the potential of the visual to encompass non-visual phenomena. These ideas span the sense of lyricism in her use of copper and gold wire to the abstraction of noise captured in her serialized thinnam paintings, which retain the faint echo of the artist’s tinkering with the metallic tools.

Kindred with the work of Nasreen Mohamedi who similarly developed a Minimalist style steeped in local interests, Meppayil’s approach to her work is forged through her family’s long history working as goldsmiths in Bangalore. Also in dialogue with Western postwar artists such as Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, Meppayil’s work investigates the material conditions and status of art. She expands upon these precedents and their attendant ideas around abstraction, craft, materiality and process, reconstructing them through an acute awareness of their histories as well as the potent sense of tradition petrified in her goldsmiths’ tools. The encounter between geographies, disciplines and histories at the core of Meppayil’s work prompts what Benjamin H.D. Buchloh identifies as “a latent desire to leave behind the parameters of pictorial space and its supporting surfaces, reaching for an ultimate sublation of the painterly rectangle in a numinous architectural space.”

Meppayil’s exhibition in New York builds on the momentum of her participation in the 2013 Venice Biennale and her presentation at Art Basel’s Unlimited sector. Pace will publish a supplement to the 2014 catalogue for her exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome and Pace London, which featured essays by Deepak Ananth, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Peter Benson Miller. This publication will feature an introduction to the Meppayil’s new work as well as images of the exhibition in New York and of tw/one (2016), her large-scale installation at Art Basel.

Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, Bangalore) studied at Bangalore University and Ken School of Art, Bangalore. She has exhibited widely in India and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the American Academy in Rome in 2014. This year, she presented major installations in Art Basel’s Unlimited sector, curated by Gianni Jetzer, and the Dhaka Art Summit. Meppayil’s work will also be featured in this year’s Kochi Muziris Biennale which opens December 12 and runs through March 29, 2017. Her work has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions including Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Kunstmuseum Bern (2007–08); Orientations: Trajectories in Indian Art, Foundation De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, Belgium (2010); Equator #1: Shadow Lines: Indonesia Meets India in the Yogyakarta Biennale (2011); and The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Pinault Collection; and the Samdani Collection, Dhaka.

Meppayil lives and works in Bangalore. This is her second exhibition at Pace.