Artists who form part of a monumental group show– II

A grand group exhibit at the renowned Aicon Gallery in New York looks to trace impressive evolution of the contemporary Indian art scene through though provoking works produced by some of the leading artist of the current generation. Among them, Jitish Kallat belongs to a new generation of artists and thought makers with no trepidations on the impossibility of today’s originality, with an equal lack of hesitation in accepting the derivation of cultural influences.

The question asked by his work is how we should negotiate this reticulated terrain while deriving insight from his frenetic visual landscapes to evoke a unique and personalized response. Another promising and talented artist Justin Ponmany draws his influences from the transient city landscape, under constant construction, in what he terms the ‘Plastic Memory’ of culture.Very much entwined as an artist to his worldly surroundings, he values interpersonal relationships as greatly as intrapersonal responses to one’s environment, looking at the subject and his world in the same frame.

His perceptive adjustment to changing situations and relationships is conveyed on his canvas, capturing an intangible event through a tactile medium. By experimenting with various mediums and materials – like plastic paint, silver holograms, foils and rich pigments – his mixed-media works seem to resemble photo negatives, filled with black and silver undertones. This adventurous mix gives his work a shiny almost hallucinogenic quality.

Chintan Upadhyay holds a unique position in the context of Contemporary Indian Art. Asserting that artworks are commodities in themselves, he believes his works to be mass-produced, consumerist objects with aesthetic and ideological values infused to their economic value. In a world driven by the rules of consumerism, he, as the artist, refuses to attribute subliminal values to artworks. This eventually imparts a uniqueness based in originality.

According to him, an artist exists among a chain of already ‘produced’ and ‘consumed’ images, thus rendering himself submissive to the dominance of images. Artistic products are simply gestures to nullify the predetermined and mediated meanings of symbolic objects produced within the context of Art.