Wednesday 30 March 2016

Sudarshan Shetty


Artville Artist Of The Day
Sudarshan Shetty
No Title
(from "this too shall pass")
teak wood, motor mechanical device
258 x 146 x 141 cm
2010
The show ‘this too shall pass’ is built around the notions of permanence and the ‘artifice’ of presenting it.
‘this too shall pass’ attempts, through a world of representations and suggestions, to play on the viewer’s encounters with the quotidian worlds of the city, home and street as they incorporate everyday objects, machine parts and readymades, easily available in the streets around my home and studio in Mumbai.
The assemblages suggestci and embed traces of urban processing as the ty itself serves as the artist’s studio, while the gallery is infused with the performative qualities of the street.
Drawing on a world of shared meaning, the object-assemblage materially incorporates and disperses those shared meanings into the viewer’s experience.
courtesy: http://galleryske.com/

Tuesday 29 March 2016

Bharti Kher



 
Artist Of The Day
Bharti Kher
The hot winds that blow from the West (detail),
2011
131 old radiators
 76 3/4 x 103 7/8 x 100 in

New York, NY… Beginning March 6, 2012, Hauser & Wirth New York will present ‘The hot winds that blow from the West’, its first exhibition devoted to internationally admired artist Bharti Kher.

Through a group of five works, the London-born, Delhi-based artist further plumbs metaphysical questions raised by our relationship to life’s quotidian activities and objects. Kher has described her practice as ‘the hunt for a chimera,’ a search through which she has come to see the self as a multiple open to interpretation, projection and shape-shifting. Her artmaking – including collecting and transforming found objects in a process that might best be described as fabulation – yields an air of magical realism. In ‘The hot winds that blow from the West,’ the artist plays with mythology, cultural and gender stereotypes, and tropes of domesticity to map a route on which viewers may travel between the familiar and the alien, the mundane and the divine, all while remaining in one place.

‘The hot winds that blow from the West’ will remain on view through April 14, 2012.

Responding to the intimate domestic architecture of Hauser & Wirth’s East 69th Street townhouse, Bharti Kher has choreographed her works in a sequence that draws visitors through physical and psychological space. Domestic life is a persistent theme in her work, and the home front becomes a landscape where the material, the emotional and the allegorical mix. ‘In Asia and India, the house and domestic space constitute a female domain and this is where women are able to truly assert more ‘self’ within space,’ Kher has said. ‘But a house is also fraught with social, economic and sexual excesses that can obscure or even threaten to obliterate the spiritual connections that are our greatest resources.’ In a house, such everyday objects as the furniture and architectural elements Kher uses to construct her works, carry divine cosmic energies awaiting our engagement.

In ‘The hot winds that blow from the West,’ Kher introduces her themes – male and female energies in flux, transformation and alternative realities, nature and man – with a large wall-mounted work titled ‘A view of the forest.’

Entering the gallery’s main ground floor space, visitors will discover a massive 17 foot-long staircase. This defunct architectural fragment from an old house in India occupies the center of the room, reaching the ceiling but leading nowhere; by thwarting its purpose, Kher creates a sense of disorientation. The staircase has been splashed with red paint and covered with a swarm of black, sperm-shaped bindis, the iconic personal affect of Indian women that is one of Kher’s signature materials and a loaded symbol. Since first appearing in her work in 1995, the bindi has telegraphed aesthetic and cultural duality, and a means to mix the superficial with the sublime. ‘Many people believe it’s a traditional symbol of marriage while others, in the West particularly, see it as a fashion accessory,’ she has explained. ‘But actually the bindi is meant to represent a third eye – one that forges a link between the real and the spiritual-conceptual worlds.’

In the sky lit back room of the gallery’s ground floor, visitors will find the work from which the exhibition takes its title. ‘The hot winds that blow from the West’ is a monolith comprised of old radiators sourced by Kher in the United States over the course of six years and shipped to India. Ultimate symbols of domestic comfort in the West, these displaced appliances have been unmoored both literally and figuratively; the journey eastward has removed their purpose and altered their significance. With its rows of pipes and peeling paint, this stack of defunct tools evokes decaying animal carcasses with ribs exposed. Here, the powerfully familiar is transmuted into something otherworldly, alien and elusive.

The title of this work is a reference to The Loo, a fiercely hot, maddening and occasionally even fatal summer afternoon wind that blows across North India and Pakistan. ‘We think of winds as harbingers of change, carrying voices of transformation,’ Kher has said. ‘From where I sit, the winds blowing nowadays from the West – from the places that were the seats of power and authority throughout the 20th century – are no longer as strong or reliable as they were. Other voices are changing the landscape now and political uncertainties have put the world in flux, feeling precarious. Traveling East, these radiators became defunct. I suppose I am sending them back to the West as messenger and, perhaps, as warnings.’

On the gallery’s second floor, the exhibition continues with two works. A life-sized fiberglass figure – part woman and part animal – brandishes a pitchfork and dances on one foot. Powerful and vulnerable with exposed genitals and a monkey tail curling up over her shoulder, this apparition is described by Kher as ‘an urban witch, a woman of both mythology and everyday life, a hybrid.’ The sculpture is the most recent in a series of figurative works in which Kher has presented hybrid beings that conjoin contradictions of gender, species, race and role. For this work, the artist has drawn upon the attributes of the Hindu goddess Dakini, who is considered the manifestation of energy in female form. Associated with revelations, Dakini (Sanskrit for she who traverses the sky or she who moves in space) is an agent of creation and transformation – a willful instigator, messenger, and even a volatile trickster whose purpose is to push souls further towards enlightenment. Kher’s figure is elegant and alien, a simultaneous celebration of and rebuke to conventional female roles.

The rest of the exhibition envelopes visitors in an installation titled ‘Reveal the secrets that you seek,’ presented last spring at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A journey ends here among twenty-seven shattered, salvaged mirrors patterned with bindis that conflate two and three dimensions. Whereas Kher customarily employs dense, swirling patterns of the tiny dots, bindis in this work are fashioned for the first time into strict, structured grids of lines that imply codes of concealed information. In the larger collage of the work’s broken reflections and frames, a visitor’s own visage becomes part of the artist’s composition. ‘It is assumed that because I was raised by Indian parents in England and then moved to India myself, I am commenting upon my own displacement or my own journey,’ Kher commented. ‘But my motivation does not come from the usual issues of diaspora. I am always far more interested in the viewer’s journey than my own. I get my ideas from you.’
courtesy: http://www.hauserwirth.com/
#art   #contemporaryart   #barthikher   #artistoftheday   #artville

Monday 28 March 2016

Atul Dodiya


Artville Artist Of The Day
Atul Dodiya
One of India’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Atul Dodiya has created a niche for himself not just in India but internationally. The history and culture of his home country plays a significant role in constructing the barrage of images that inform his oeuvre. Launching his career with a rather straightforward and cleverly deadpan realist approach, he switched to the fragmented and multi-layered approach from the literal one in the mid-90s.
Conscious of history, his rich oeuvre reflects his deep knowledge about immediate surroundings, current events and ancient religious traditions. He often quotes from the recesses of Indian as well as Western art traditions. Even his potent pictorial language can be attributed to his to adoption and usage of the vocabulary of Western contemporary art. Driven by intellect, intensity and ideas, he continues to experiment with many forms. According to him, ‘I’ve always tried to retain that student phase in Sir J.J. School of Art when seeing a new form or new medium greatly excited us about its possibilities.’ Even as he strives to bring contemporary Indian art into a closer, deeper embrace with Western Post-Modernist art, Atul Dodiya also looks to the former closer to its fundamental roots, through re-adjustment, and reproaches to mythological and cultural figure. His recent shutter paintings at Art Basel 2010 courtesy Chemould Prescott Road respond to iconic paintings from the 1970s by late Bhupen Khakhar, called ‘trade series’, depicting middle-class figures from a wide range of professions.
courtesy:www.theartstrust.com

Saturday 26 March 2016

N.S.Harsha

Artville Artist Of The Day
NS Harsha
Why,
2014
Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 86 cm 24 1/8 x 33 7/8 in

NS Harsha draws on a broad spectrum of Indian artistic and figurative painting traditions and popular arts as well as the western art canon to create luminous works that reflect on geopolitical order and its localised idiosyncrasies. In exquisitely rendered paintings, works on paper, wall and floor works, sculptures, site-specific installations and public projects, the Mysore-based artist examines structures, borders and barriers as a series of ever-shifting concepts, alluding to an interconnectedness that compels the viewer to consider their relationship to the art work as part of a wider conversation about systems of knowledge, belief and power.
#art #contemporaryartist #nsharsha #artville #artistoftheday

Thursday 24 March 2016

Gerhard Richter


Artville Artist Of The Day
Gerhard Richter
Strip
2011 300 cm x 300 cm Catalogue Raisonné: 922-2
Digital print on paper between Alu Dibond and Perspex (Diasec)
Gerhard Richter was born to Horst and Hildegard Richter in Dresden on February 9, 1932. Having married the year before, Gerhard was their first child, with a daughter, Gisela, arriving in 1936. Horst Richter, with whom Gerhard did not have a close relationship, was a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden.1 Hildegard was a bookseller and, like her father, a talented pianist. She was passionate about literature, and passed on her enthusiasm and knowledge to the young Gerhard. They were, in many respects, an average middle-class family. In an interview with Robert Storr Richter described his early family life as "simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and the father earning money".2
In 1935, Horst was offered a post at a school in Reichenau, then a part of Saxony, now Bogatynia in Poland. The family duly moved to the town, which was much smaller and less stimulating than Dresden.3 While living there was to prove much safer than being in Dresden when the war began, it perhaps marked the beginning of a gradual deterioration in the relationship between Horst and Hildegard. The strain was increased when Horst was conscripted into the German army. He left to fight first on the eastern front and then on the western front where he was captured by the Allied forces and detained in an American prisoner of war camp until the end of the war. In 1946 he was released and returned to his family, who by now had relocated from Reichenau to the even smaller Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border.
On his return, Horst's reception was not as warm as he might have hoped. Commenting on this many years later, Gerhard explained: "He shared most fathers' fate at the time… Nobody wanted them."4 In an interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker in 2004 he added: "[We] were so alienated from him that we didn't know how to deal with each other."5 Although he seemed to have held neutral political opinions, Horst's former membership of the National Socialist Party – an organization that all teachers had been obliged to join – made it virtually impossible to return to teaching. He worked for a while in a textile mill in nearby Zittau before finding a post as an administrator of a distance learning program for an educational institution in Dresden.6
Gerhard's own memories of his early years are a combination of fondness and frustration, sadness and excitement. While his family left Dresden when Richter was only three years old, he recalls the house in which he was born in Grossenhainer Strasse, and in particular the house of his great-grandmother "not far from the original Circus Sarrasani building, where as a young lad I could see the elephant stalls through the cellar windows. My great-grandmother's sewing box, made of armadillo skin. A man falling from a ladder – something that, according to my parents, only I had seen".7 Little is documented about Gerhard's memories of Reichenau, though his recollections about his time in Waltersdorf are more vivid, not least because when they moved to the village, he was already more than ten years old. He has been described as "a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school"8 with Dietmar Elger noting that "he even brought home poor grades in drawing".9 He dropped out of grammar school in Zittau and attended instead a vocational school, where he studied stenography, accounting and Russian. In addition to not enjoying school, he felt he didn't really belong in Waltersdorf. He recalled, "We had moved to a new village, and automatically I was an outsider. I couldn't speak the dialect and so on."10 Like most boys of his age, he was obliged to join the Pimpfen in 1942, an organization for children that prepared them for the Hitler Youth. Fortunately, he was just a little too young to have been conscripted to the army himself during the last year of the war.11
Despite living in the countryside, Gerhard's experience of the war was nonetheless intense. Apart from economic hardship and the absence of his father for several important years in his development, his family did not escape personal loss, with Hildegard's two brothers, Rudi and Alfred, both being killed in active service. "It was sad when my mother's brothers fell in battle. First one, then the other. I'll never forget how the women screamed."12 Hildegard's sister Marianne also encountered a regrettable end to her life: suffering from mental health problems, as a result of the eugenics policies of the Third Reich she starved to death in a psychiatric clinic.13
While spared much of the direct bombing to which nearby Dresden was exposed, the war was very much present in Waltersdorf. Speaking to Jan Thorn-Prikker, Gerhard remembers, "The retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasions of the Russians […] the ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup."14 Gerhard was fascinated by the military, commenting, "When the soldiers came through the village, I went up to them and wanted to join them."15 Speaking to Robert Storr, he explained, "When you're twelve years old you're too little to understand all that ideological hocus-pocus".16 With boyish curiosity and a sense of adventure, he and his friends would play in the woods and trenches, shooting rifles that they had found lying around. "I thought it was great. […] I was fascinated, like all kids, or all boys".17 Although he was young, he understood the significance of the war, and in February 1945, recalls the virtual obliteration of Dresden: "In the night, everyone came out into the street in this village 100 kilometers away. Dresden was being bombed, 'Now, at this moment!'"18
The end of World War II in many ways coincided with Gerhard's transition from childhood to adolescence, and, now under Soviet control following the Potsdam Agreement, it was to be a very different Germany to the one he had been born into.
courtesy:www.gerhard-richter.com

Wednesday 23 March 2016

Damien Hirst


Artville Artist Of The Day
Damien Hirst
Psalm 23: Dominus regit me.
2008
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
Diameter: 457 mm | 18 in
Painting
Kaleidoscope Paintings
Image: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.
Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practise of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.[1]
Hirst developed his interest in exploring the “unacceptable idea” of death as a teenager in Leeds. From the age of sixteen, he made regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings (‘With Dead Head’ (1991)). The experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years’ (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.”[2]
At Goldsmiths, Hirst’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed significantly, and he began work on some of his most important series. The ‘Medicine Cabinets’ created in his second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Hirst’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.”[3] This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘Pharmacy’ (1992).
Whilst in his second year, Hirst conceived and curated ‘Freeze’ – a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of Goldsmiths students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists. For its final phase he painted two series of coloured spots on to the warehouse walls. Hirst describes the spot paintings as a means of “pinning down the joy of colour”, and explains they provided a solution to all problems he’d previously had with colour. It has become one of the artist’s most prolific and recognisable series, and in January 2012 the works were exhibited in a show of unprecedented scale across eleven Gagosian Gallery locations worldwide.[4]
In 1991 Hirst began work on ‘Natural History’, arguably his most famous series. Through preserving creatures in minimalist steel and glass tanks filled with formaldehyde solution, he intended to create a “zoo of dead animals”.[5] In 1992, the shark piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) was unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Young British Artists I’ exhibition. The shark, described by the artist as a “thing to describe a feeling”, remains one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and popular culture in the 90’s. The series typifies Hirst’s interest in display mechanisms. The glass boxes he employs both in ‘Natural History’ works and in vitrines, such as ‘The Acquired Inability to Escape’ (1991), act to define the artwork’s space, whilst simultaneously commenting on the “fragility of existence”.[6]
Since his involvement in ‘Freeze’ in 1988, curatorial projects have remained important to the artist. In 1994 he organised the international group exhibition ‘Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away’ at the Serpentine Gallery. Over a decade later, and explaining that he considers collections to constitute a “map of a man’s life”, he curated an award-winning exhibition of work from his ‘Murderme’ collection: ‘In the darkest hour there may be light’ (2006, Serpentine Gallery).
Stating: “I am absolutely not interested in tying things down”, Hirst has continued over the last decade to explore the “big issues” of “death, life, religion, beauty, science.”[7] In 2007, he unveiled the spectacular, ‘For the Love of God’ (2007): a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavĂ©-set diamonds, at the White Cube exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’. The following year, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement in selling 244 new works at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Describing the sale as a means of democratising the art market, the ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ auction followed Hirst’s Sotheby’s event in 2004, in which the entire contents of the artist’s restaurant venture, Pharmacy, were sold.
Since 1987, over 80 solo Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide and his work has been included in over 260 group shows. Hirst’s first major retrospective ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ was held in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples in 2004. His contribution to British art over the last two and a half decades was recognised in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work staged at Tate Modern.
Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon.
courtesy:www.damienhirst.com

Sunday 20 March 2016

Gigi Scaria


Artville Artist Of The Day
Gigi Scaria
Through a glass darkly
Medium: 2 piece installation, wood, aluminum composite sheet, glass, Stainless steel and paint
Size: 48 x 24 x 5 inches
img courtesy: http://www.gigiscaria.in/
Born in 1973 in Kothanalloor, Kerala, Gigi Scaria completed his Bachelor’s degree in painting from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, in 1995, and his Master’s degree in the same from Jamia Millia University, New Delhi, in 1998.
Gigi Scaria’s work draws the viewer’s attention towards the painful truths of migrancy and displacement. The issue of non-belonging and unsettlement reverberate between the walls on his canvas. “Gigi’s particular position is to investigate how city structures, social constructs, and the view of location is translated in social prejudice and class attitude,” says critic and curator Gayatri Sinha.
Scaria’s solo shows include ‘Absence of an Architect’ at Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2007; ‘Where are the Amerindians?’ at Inter America Space, Trinidad, in 2005 following his residency at CCA7 there; the Art Inc., New Delhi, in 2001; and Great Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 1998. Amongst his group shows, the most recent include, ‘Popular Reality’ at the Stainless Gallery, New Delhi, Jam Jar, Dubai, and Clark House, Mumbai, in 2008-2009; ‘Keep Drawing’ at Gallery Espace, New Delhi; ‘Walk On Line’ at Avanthy Contemporary, Zurich; ‘Indiavata (India + Avatar): Contemporary Artists from India’ at Gallery Sun Contemporary, Korea; ‘Young Contemporary Indian Artists’ at 1x1 Gallery, Dubai; ‘Click! Contemporary Photography in India’ at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi; and ‘Who Knows Mr. Gandhi ?’ at Aicon Gallery, London, all in 2008. Scaria also completed residencies in Biella, Italy in 2002 and New Delhi in 2004. In 2005, the artist was honoured with the Sanskriti Award in Visual Art. Scaria lives and works in New Delhi.
courtesy:Born in 1973 in Kothanalloor, Kerala, Gigi Scaria completed his Bachelor’s degree in painting from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, in 1995, and his Master’s degree in the same from Jamia Millia University, New Delhi, in 1998.
courtesy: http://www.saffronart.com/
‪#‎art‬ ‪#‎contemporaryartist‬ ‪#‎gigiscaria‬ ‪#‎artistoftheday‬ ‪#‎artville‬

Saturday 19 March 2016

Vivan Sundaram



Artville Artist Of The Day
Vivan SUNDARAM,
Barricade (with Coils),
2008,
digital print, 
100cm x 181.5cm.
Vivan Sundaram has embraced multifarious roles in his prolific career an artist. This section is dedicated solely to Sundaram's artwork, including more than 1,000 digitised images of his artworks, exhibition views, and photographs documenting installation processes.
Sundaram's career is documented in elaborate detail, including his paintings from the 1960s through the turbulent times of the Emergency in the 1970s, and his resolution to stop painting in 1990 and turn to sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Extensive documentation in the form of correspondence, exhibition proposal, and budget and layout plans of the now iconic site-specific work, Structures of Memory, shown in Victoria Memorial Hall in 1998, is also included in the section. A number of artist statements, concept notes, and essays by Sundaram have also been digitally preserved. Finally, Sundaram's section includes complete digital scans of the artist's five scrap books, which contain over 600 articles, reviews, newspaper clippings, and interviews in which Sundaram is featured.
courtesy: http://www.aaa.org

Thursday 17 March 2016

Ravi Kumar Kashi


Artville artist of the day
Ravi Kumar Kashi
Tittle: Experiments with truth
Medium: Cast cotton rag pulp, photocopy transfer, ink, archival print, wooden stand.

Ravikumar Kashi is an artist whose works defy easy categorisation. He has done painting, sculpture, photography and installation, but they combine or cut across defined expectations from these mediums. His idea / concept driven works are layered and connect with the viewer in multiple ways. Introspection is an important aspect of his works which touch upon the idea of self and its many facets. He has also explored the themes of desire, gratification, consumerism and destruction in individuals and at the societal level.
courtesy : http://www.ravikashi.com/AboutUs.aspx

#art #contemporaryartist #ravikumarkashi #artistoftheday #artville