A solo of media-driven works by Subha Ghosh in London

Indar Pasricha Contemporary & Ben Hanly present the work of New-Delhi based Subha Ghosh in London. In particular his work appropriates the distinctly Indian art form of hand-painted billboard hoardings, which until the advent of cheap commercial printing were widely used throughout India in advertising and political campaigns.

Born in Delhi in 1961, he did his BA and MA at the College of Art, New Delhi and later studied Fine Art at the Surikov Institute of Fine Art, Moscow. In 1996 he completed a second MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art. He has exhibited extensively throughout India and internationally. His work can be seen in many public and private collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, India and GlaxoSmithKline.

He subverts this familiar format by depicting not the Politicians, Bollywood stars or Western consumer brands which are normally shown, but rather depicting portraits of the poor and ordinary people from the streets. By doing so he aims to force the viewer to acknowledge the very people whom they routinely ignored in everyday life.

In particular, Subha Ghosh is fascinated by the huge scale of these billboards and how they seem to visually transform those depicted into something larger than life, into almost God-like beings - the use of scale metaphorically mirroring and enforcing existing social and class divides. In this context, when the artist chooses to substitute portraits of the poor for the rich and powerful, he is deliberately choosing to show them elevated to a similar status. A controversial stance in an
India still beset by massive social inequality.

The artist’s use of the cut-out is also highly significant as it enables him to produce hyper-realistic representations of his sitters. It also gives the artist the ability to dislocate these sitters from their original location and environment.

This results in the visual and conceptional juxtaposition of seeing the poor of India standing in stark gallery environments or in the elegance of rich collectors’ houses – both places where they could never normally hope to gain admittance. Once again the artist provokes the viewer into acknowledging the underbelly of Indian society.