Mondongo includes artists Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Augustina Picasso who began collaborating in 2000. Born in Andhra Pradesh in 1966, Bari Kumar studied at J. Krishnamurthi’s Rishi Valley School, and later did a BFA (Graphic Design) from the Otis/ Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles.
Their insightful pairing of subject matter and medium results in a visual meditation on the agency of ubiquitous materials and the moments of meaning in life - purposeful or prescribed. Large-scale ‘paintings’ in the show are constructed with a host of unconventional substances. By using materials intrinsically linked to the message the objects become complicit with it. The works themselves turn both the perpetrator and the perpetrated, thus building a vacuum of intense representation. A curatorial note states:
“The initial meeting of the artists was a truly happenstance event and the impulse to create a visual conversation between their works has been strong from the first discovery of their separate projects. Eessentially a painter, he began to experiment with fabric constructions in 2007.In this exhibition, Bari Kumar’s work is predominantly of fabric constructions. He has depicted segments of nude bodies with the material conventionally utilized to cover them to emphasize their shifting contexts covering and the miscommunications caused when such distinctions do not any longer follow an expected trajectory. On the other hand, Mondongo artists have used Plasticine (similar to play-dough), mirror, make-up, thread, tar etc.
"By using a commonly acquired and viewed material to depict a related but far more contentious form, the artist emphasizes questions of voice, marginality, and inherent meaning. Mondongo's work has followed a similar path. The group has created realistic representations of portraits, landscapes, and objects using commonplace and specifically coded materials.”
The preview shows a selection of the works to form part of the full-length exhibition in September.
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