Fresh talent from Baroda school on view

The artists, who form part of a new group show at the Mumbai-based Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, are fresh out of art school in Baroda and Hyderabad. Here’s a quick glance at their work:

Samir Mohanty’s subjects evoke an emotional response. Realistic reproductions of the moon lay broken, causing a disturbance in its aesthetic patterns. But through the warping of its perceived dimensions we are transported into the realm of imagination where the moon is no longer an inanimate object.

His second subject in this exhibition is a man, obstructed by the presence of steel pins driven through his hands, face and legs. While the pins obstruct the view of the man, our mind still constructs a seemingly real image of him with the scant visual information that it reads through the matrix of pins.

Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo's installation uses artisan symbols from the environment of the place of her influence – Bastar. Using references to bell metal casting and weaving, she introduces objects of daily use from her surrounding, transforming these. Preserved within a veil, they converge with loose threads to supplement the weaving process.

Positioned at the forefront of this transformation is a technique of creating art forms – bell metal casting – which forms the core of the installation. This technique is supported by the material used in weaving. The idea is to challenge the viewer on two fronts. Firstly, when in an object's history can one begin to distinguish it as craft or art; and secondly, what is it that transforms seemingly ordinary objects and motifs into art.

Midhungopi P. presents a set of drawing and watercolors on rice paper pasted over a support of weighty art paper. The rice paper receives several washes of watercolor and is at times even gently pushed back to reveal the base, before the artists Objects of Memory are drawn upon it.

In the geographic location of his childhood many of the natural forms depicted in Midhungopi’s works are commonplace. Almost immediately we begin to notice that what at once appeared to be ordinary has an unlikely twist. One debates whether the work represents a real memory that has been removed from context, or an imagined memory, dream or illusion so strong it presents itself as an old memory, a Kafkaesque crisis.