Upholding values of humanity: Bose Krishnamachari’s ‘NO’

Bose Krishnamachari’s solo show held in Dubai has received critical applause and good response from viewers as well. Entitled ‘NO’, the series held at 1x1 Gallery in Dubai encapsulates his coveted ideas of self-respect as well as his earnest effort to fight injustice.

Reviewing the works, writer Ed Lake of The Nationalist publication in The UAE notes:”The old stuff greets you first. His ‘Stretched Bodies’ series is a sequence of giant, psychedelic acrylics, explosions of saturated color, which retain just enough structure to indicate a confused and artificial interior space.”

He engages with his two favorite icons, Andy Warhol and Piet Mondrian, both denoting western tradition while revisiting some of his peculiar artistic approaches. A Piet Mondrian painting here serves as a point of departure to construct a tree that doubles itself as an able expressionistic shelf. In ‘Mondrian’s Tree’, he expresses his own concept of ‘the East meeting the West’. Ed Lake elaborates in his essay:

“The De Stijl painter comes in for more explicit tweaking in another installation, a set of white bookshelves- crooked in design so as to appear like crazy paving. They are fringed with a kind of architrave to give them the outline of cartoon clouds, or, for that matter, of a land mass, which is crisscrossed by roads. Mondrian’s arid geometry is forced into new dimensions and returned to the world of objects.”

‘White Ghost and Red Carpet’ is a sort of a ‘re-presentation’. The artist has been quoted as saying in an article in The DNA India:

“With small scale wars and calamities as the backdrop, every leader today is trying to tell things to people. One can hear the cacophony of statements by the world leaders in this sculptural installation. Mahatma Gandhi is a metaphorical expression of the artist’s own self in a diminutive form, against Gandhiji’s monumental portrait.”

The series takes a re-look at history in recognition of the fact that art practice at any point of time should not swerve from history. The works allude to history in the contemporary context, touching upon justice and injustice, war and peace, and the human beings, most importantly.