A joint show by Eberhard Havekost and Manish Nai

The old gets reinvented as something new and the apparently valueless positioned in a space, which frames it with ‘value’ is where German artist Eberhard Havekost and India’s Manish Nai connect. The former’s oil-on-canvas work ‘News’ is the Virgin Mary in a French church - a 14th century figurine - with splashes of red paint splattered all across her face during a restoration project. It represents the ‘representation of the self’.

For Nai, on the other hand, a self-professed studio-based practitioner, the process is wholly the internalization of basic materials. It develops from the usage of jute, he took from his father’s business that went under while the artist in final year of his college studies. The loss sparked his experiment in jute.

He started un-threading jute, and deconstructed it into spaces of both positive and negative, a sort of yin & yang out of a contrast of textures and shades. His densly packed fibers form compressed waves, conveying the sense of subtle in the basic.

The artist gradually shifted to process of working with newspapers. But for him, the form was important, not the base of it. His movement to make objects of value from base objects sans any value grew. Thus his black Untitled work, created out of burlap on view at Mumbai-based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is this bewildering burgeoning of the basic. The theme is repeated in another Untitled (2012), a dazzling digital archival print with hand-applied watercolor done on Hahnemühle paper. In effect, it’s a concrete wall.

Alternating Manish Nai and Eberhard Havestock imagery at the venue goes to underline the very significance of the insignificant, the former through medium, whereas his German counterpart through imagery. His paintings are also a play on placement. A crumpled piece of ubiquitous aluminum foil when framed in ‘Selbstgespräch’ (Art Fair Picture II), steals the limelight.

The artist explains: “Everything, which lies behind or after this, is important,” he explains. His ‘Vitrine Sculpture’ depicts the opposite progression, in that it’s a pre-Columbian figurine, which lies dusty, undervalued and neglected in a Costa Rican museum. It achieves value only after being put in the space, which restores its worth.

It jells well with Manish Nai’s mantelpiece sculpture ‘Newspaper Shelf’ made of compressed squares of newspaper trash. The significance of the ‘value of value’, attached to an object, is looked at best through the apparently insignificant and mundane is the compelling understatement for all that turns newsworthy.