New Delhi
Group Show
New Works by Nidhi Agarwal, C Bhagyanath, Vir Kotak & M Pravat
Nidhi Agarwal, C Bhagyanath, Vir Kotak and M Pravat
The exhibition brings together the work of four artists who share a reductive palette as well as a limitation of means. Each approaches their craft with precision, resulting in images which are bold, confident and succinct. All four artists use drawing in an elastic way, letting it guide them to the making of the image.
Nidhi Agarwal is represented by one new large-scale work. Essentially a collage, her amalgamation of charcoal drawing with cut and pasted paper and fabrics measures eight feet high and 15 feet across. Predominantly abstract, recognizable images slowly seep to its surface, struggling to free themselves from a violent cataclysm. The stark black and white is punctuated with shots of red, amplifying the composition's aggression.
C Bhagyanath makes fluid line drawings on transparent vellum sheets and then layers them together into a single frame. By overlapping images, he is able to create something akin to an animation or a stop-motion photograph by Edward Muybridge. His figures are social, engaging in conversations and telling jokes, as well as athletic. His drawings fade into a milky ether, hovering between becoming and dissolution.
Vir Kotak takes photographs of an architectonic structure to create graphic ensembles of lines which only hesitantly enclose spaces. More drawing than photograph, his images seem like something out of a science fiction film, freed of any sense of gravity or perspective. We are in a world entirely of artifice or perhaps within the visualizations of theoretical mathematics.
M. Pravat distorts images of architectural spaces by dissolving them with solvents and adding further diagrammatic notations. He explores the reciprocal relationships between geometric constructions and organic forms, the solid as it moves between the liquid and the gaseous. The paintings of JMW Turner come to mind, as if he was practising in the age of Zaha Hadid.
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