Three artists feature in a show at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke: Reena Saini Kallat, Nicola Durvasula and CK Rajan.
They present a study in contrasts, yet ‘match’ perfectly together as the exhibition flows through the space. As Ranjana Steinruecke of the gallery says, sometimes things that have no connection work well together.
Perhaps the most evocative section is Kallat’s installation. Called Walls of the Womb, it is the story of motherhood, seen through the eyes of a child and with the experience of a woman. It consists of scrolls of silk, saris dyed in differently vivid reds draped from breast-ended pelmets against pink-red walls, each with a different, distinct message.
And it speaks of the warmth and softness of a mother-daughter bond, with the subliminal violence of childbirth. The artist lost her own mother when she was very young, and so has a distance from the relationship itself — this she shows through the Braille worked into bandhni dots on the silk; complete comprehensibility would force the bond to be too intimate, she believes.
But the message emerges slowly: the code spells out the recipes from the yellowing pages of the books in the vitrine, the recipes written in a fading scrawl.
Durvasula’s paint-touched drawings show their origins as lines on paper that have been added to over time and with personal history. They hold a certain refinement and layers of feeling, each simple and definitive.
The line supersedes all, even through bold splashes of red. There is a gentle delicacy to the red, hairlines that attract rather than stress. And there is a feeling that there is more to the story that remains to be told…
Rajan’s work had bold colours and emphatic statements. Thereis light and shadow, everyday objects and those strangely distortedby imagination, perhaps even nightmares, and a story that can have myriad endings, depending on who is doing the telling…or viewing.
Through it all — the bottles, the cans, the toys, the vegetables — runs a vein of humour, a sly, secret laughter that demands explanation. Hisalmost-miniature paintings done on cigarette packs are no mystery: this was the only base available to him at the time!
Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke, till April 22
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