1st Anniversary Exhibition, 2007

One by One

The face of India's contemporary art world has transformed beyond recognition in recent years, with new exhibition spaces, hyped auctions, and international attention becoming integrated features of an expanded market and culture. On the occasion of the first birthday of Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, however, what remains most striking is the overwhelming visibility of the human face. This is true not only of the warm, personal relationship among artist, collector, and gallerist seen at the lively opening of the gallery's anniversary exhibition, but also in the art on its walls: presented with the restriction of working in a one by one foot format, a sizable trend of artists fashioned representations of singular faces and heads for their contributions to this celebration.

Figuration has remained a consistent thread through the history of modern and contemporary art in India, and pointing out its recurrence is nothing new. Yet, the decision to highlight the face as opposed to the full figure is a distinct artistic endeavor, and one that seems to link comfortably with the intimacy of these small format works. For an artist like Anju Dodiya, primarily a painter of heads and faces already, her delicate watercolor contribution, Scent of a Key, can be neatly folded into an existing oeuvre. Dodiya's work elegantly dovetails Juul Kraijer's fine untitled charcoal, depicting a detached face that remains calmly focused even while being pecked by birds. G.R. lranna's Untitled acrylic on canvas painting and Amit Ambalal's oil on canvas work Dream similarly guide us into the interiority of the mind.

It might seem that the tendency is limited to artists already invested in the representation of solitary, isolated minds. But from an artist like Sudhir Patwardhan, best known for large-scale peopled urban landscapes, the emphasis on a single textured face in his Untitled acrylic for this exhibition represents a departure; the grayed outline of roughly executed features offers the viewer a thoughtful expression, rather than a defined situation. Gieve Patel's larger charcoal drawing, Two Figures, presents a darkened gray surface from which two distinct heads emerge, abstracted from any context. Both Patwardhan and Patel here offer the viewer a glimpse into a more personal style than usually seen in their works.

Prajakta Potnis and Abir Karmakar challenge the viewer with purely private issues through focused elements of self-portraiture. Potnis' diptych Stress II and Stress I juxtaposes a photographic close-up of facial acne with a painterly rendering of the same. The contrast between the uncomfortable photograph and the prettiness of the pink globules of the painting forces an innovative experiencing of a person's face. Potnis counteracts our instinct to shy from looking at blemish, encouraging the viewer to stare and compare. Her hyper­zoomed scrutiny abstracts the subject, suggesting a tension between the aesthetic and contextual. Karmakar's I Love Therefore I Am, a series of eleven oil on canvas works, visualizes the fetish by presenting images of the artist sucking, licking, or reaching for his own body parts. Karmakar's canvases, each framing his head and one other body part, present a narrative of alternately frustrated, comical, performative, and absorbed activity, led by a series of contorted facial expressions.

Other artists used representations of their own or publicly recognized faces towards statements that integrated personal with political themes. Bose Krishnamachari's pensive self-portrait in ballpoint pen draws not only from the artist's own appearance, but on a mode often used in representations of Gandhi. In another direction, Gulammohammed Sheikh's imposing Weather Vane: Incredible India / Vibrant Gujarat lends an obvious cynicism to a title drawn from recent national tourism campaigns. The work directly references the tragic riots in Gujarat in 2002, which significantly impacted the artist and his family living in Baroda. Sheikh has carved into multiple panes of this work a notorious newspaper representation of a man afflicted by the riots, reflecting a transformation of medium but not message.

Molded roughly to the I x I size restriction, the sculptural works in this exhibition developed a similar trend, with artists like Jitish Kallat and Karl Antao also fashioning representations of the human head. Kallat's series of lead works, Cavity I, Cavity 2, and Cavity 3, offered three open-mouthed versions of the same head, each distinguished by variations in haircut. Facing the viewer from the front wall of the gallery, it is almost as if the Cavities have begun a conversation into which the viewer might enter too. Antao's bronze Mind's Space, seen as a head in the round rather than just frontally, reveals a multiplicity of meanings when circumambulated: a discourse on space, air, matter, and thought emanate fluently from Antao's Mind. Tushar Joag develops a similarly grand, spatial gesture in How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky, a three­dimensional brass, teak, and painted work suspended from the wall. The work uses a close-up image of teeth, letting the viewer peer into a fabricated narrative in which the artist has been swallowed by a symbolic monster. While the teeth seen are, in fact, Joag's own, they here belong to the monster, who represents a greater social system. Using an interplay between the restricted internal space of the body and the vastness of the external world, the artist suggests that this beast inhibits him from looking out and seeing the sky at certain times. Joag's title, referring to a canonical line from the Bob Dylan song 'Blowin in the Wind,' prefigures the social content of the work.

To be sure, Mirchandani + Steinruecke's anniversary exhibition drew out other themes and achievements too. Artists like Aji VN., Prajakta Palav, Reena Saini Kallat, and Jyothi Basu, for example, highlighted inventive landscapes, seen close up and at a distant remove. Riyas Komu, Shobha Broota, and Mehlli Gobhai offered thoughtful abstractions in series formats, while Mithu Sen, Kruti Thaker, Lavanya Mani, and Archana Hande all played with layered textures in narrative works. Locating trends among such a diverse group of artists and works can be instructive, and it is remarkable to see the continuities and locate thematic threads that develop by chance from such an exhibition. But, finally, for the viewer now as well as the artist, these works emerge and stand on their own, facing us one by one.

Beth Citron
Mumbai, April 2007

Beth Citron is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her doctoral thesis focuses on contemporary art from Bombay from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. She has worked in the Asian Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, at the Asia Society and Museum, New York, and is currently working with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA on an exhibition of artwork inspired by Bombay.