Concerns of Nitin Mukul and Yamini Nayar

Nitin Mukul is an artist who is renowned for depicting minute details of events akin to various types of social rituals/sharp commentary. He deconstructs and imbues them with palpable energy as well as ambiguity.

Convergence of figurative and the abstract

His paintings are known to combine process oriented mark making with representational elements, staging an evocative interplay between the two. A densely layered picture surface results, where the figurative and the abstract converge. His practice has always been rooted in collage, and the resulting compositions have a tension that walks a fine line between balance & collapse – mirroring the fragile state of our world today.

He recasts and recombines ritual imagery, architectural remnants, and popular icons to give clues to a narrative which is often autobiographical. He utilizes a combination of traditional and unconventional materials, including black tea stain, which becomes conceptually charged through its relationship to the works underlying thematic content, namely the intersection of the social, the biological and the manmade as they relate to a rapidly evolving global

The opening reception as part of a group show at the New York-based Aicon Gallery featured a screening of the new video by him, with a live score by Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture) and software designer Bill Bowen, utilizing their recently developed SUFI PLUG-INS, an interdisciplinary project dedicated to exploring non-western and poetic notions of sound, creating a space where software design, music tools, encoded spirituality, digital art and indigenous knowledge systems overlap.

Imagined interiors that explore architecture and memory

Yamini Nayar’s imagined interiors explore architecture and memory via the representation of constructed (and deconstructed) space. Drawing from the visual allegories of architecture, with the model and final photograph weaving together existing narratives with elements of fragmented idealism, they serve as documents of sculptural installations built from a myriad of sources - architectural history, cinema, literature, personal narrative - and exist solely for the lens.

Once the sculpture is recorded, the physical installation is discarded and only the image remains, as a document, entry point and object held together for the 'photographic' moment.

(Information courtesy: Aicon)