Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Concerns and milestones Jitish Kallat

Jitish Kallat is known for his large-scale ambitious works. Jitish Kallat’s subject matter has often been termed by some critics as 'the old, recycled and patched-together fabric of urban India'.

He studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. He has had several solo shows in India and abroad apart from participating in the prestigious group exhibitions and important museum shows like 'Thermocline of Art – New Asian Waves', the ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe (2007); The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia (2006), and The 6th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2006). His recent solos have taken place at galleries in Beijing, London and other prominent cities.

Born in 1974, he has had many solo exhibits in top international galleries like Haunch of Venison in London, Arario Gallery in Beijing, and Arndt in Berlin. His works have been exhibited in group shows in leading international museums, institutions and fairs around the world, including Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane), Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery (London), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Kunstmuseum (Bern), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and MAXXI (Rome).

Many of the sensitive artist's works focus on Mumbai's downtrodden. He mostly treats them in a bold, bashful, and highly graphic manner. At the heart of the Jitish Kallat’s interest in the bustling metropolis of Mumbai lies the experience of the confused individual within the crowd. This is essentially driven by a play on scale, understood more in terms of a subject's physical as well as metaphorical presence.

Undermining peculiar notions of the local and universal, putting aside the conventional view of micro and the macro, and the way the two may infect one another, his new set of work, entitled ‘The Astronomy of the Subway' turns into a sustained meditation on the existing urban dwelling condition.

His wider concerns remain about India's attempts to negotiate its entry and presence into a new world economy, even while struggling to address housing and transportation crises, woeful city planning, escalating caste and communal tensions, and (lack of) government accountability.

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