New-Delhi based Vadehra Art Gallery hosts a solo show, entitled ‘Extra Ordinary’ by Hema Upadhyay. The new series is an amalgamation of painted surfaces and photographic cut-outs, shots of the Real City encounter imaginary worlds, the artifice of globalization creating a bizarre beauty that holds onto itself through delicate threads.
Regarding her processes and broad themes, she explains, "I like to tell any stories, whether real or imaginative. These are even reflections of one's phobias, shortcomings. The recurring theme in my work is autobiographical. In addition, it is the cathartic factor that becomes the reason to take these objects and convert their ability. My work is cathartic in process."
In the present suite of works, as a press release states, she explores the subtexts of the two disparate words - the ordinariness of an ‘extra’ life that the metropolis offers its citizens. Unlike the overall decorative patterning of her earlier work (often used as a visual camouflage) within which the body/city conversed, fluid design appears at the edges of these paintings, framed within frames of overlapping narratives.
“Fixated at the centre in sombre dark hues of polluted grey and sleazy black, the decaying city emerges out of a bordered beauty. The actual and fictive, imagined and remembered city are evoked through personal and social worlds of the artist; she frames the canvases with the Mumbai skyline seen in picture postcards and advertising lingua and zooms with imaginary binoculars onto real issues of environmental degradation and the apathy that governs our existence,” the statement explains.
The onslaught of metropolitan life and our struggles to preserve our subjectivities gives rise to an ontological insecurity; in the production of cities lies the hidden workings of desire and fear. Through the tropes of doubling and concealment Upadhyay beings together politics and poetics, urging us to understand the darkness of our lived moments, questioning the future of her city that lies threatened with the destruction of its own discovery.
New-Delhi based Vadehra Art Gallery hosts a solo show, entitled ‘Extra Ordinary’ by Hema Upadhyay. The new series is an amalgamation of painted surfaces and photographic cut-outs, shots of the Real City encounter imaginary worlds, the artifice of globalization creating a bizarre beauty that holds onto itself through delicate threads.
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