Tuesday, July 24, 2012

A painter who employ Indian miniature style to depict contemporary concerns

At times it’s a pure expression of a given situation, or it’s a fine blending of imagery: towers into people, roses into founding fathers. Striated and fragmented, her representation of the human form is unconventional.
The image starts becoming paradoxically more abstract, as she digs into greater detail. The outcome is a beautifully colored, albeit slightly unnerving, composition of sunning tourists engrossed in their multi-faceted existences...

Artist Schandra Singh, who mostly works in the medium of oil and gouache, touches upon shared social and political realities. Indeed, her paintings transport us to a purgatorial space of curiously contrived paradise. What might outwardly seem like an innocuous theme turns out to be one loaded with extreme tension and visual dynamism, as the artist captures complex shades of modern life.

She has mentioned of her work, “As an artist whose cultural heritage stems from Austria and India, I employ the mode of storytelling of the Indian miniature painter. It’s juxtaposed with inspirations of neo–expressionism. In a world where we are often asked to take a side to know the answers, my work looks to challenge the viewer by not didactically presenting one way, but simply by addressing my fears to express a (specific) human condition.”

“In sight of her obliquely satirical works viewers are made to see themselves dissolving in acidic torrents of anthropomorphic anxiety, false security, and delusional spectacles of wealth, excess and waste. The artist deftly documents a group of people suspended in the heavily precarious interstitial state between anxiety and leisure while holidaying.

Translating the individuals into large-scale paintings Schandra Singh prompts an investigation of the false sense of world security. One could notice smaller figures that lurk in the nooks and crannies of the images compounding the sense of unrest. The minutely detailed painted surface also gives us passages of untouched linen canvas as a space for contemplation.

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