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Studio 3 : Flesh and Form
Where conflict left its mark on the body from without, here that same body turns its attention toward its own material possibility. The body has always been more than its outline. In these works, the figure moves between faithful depiction and open experimentation, flesh rendered with precision in one moment, stretched, exaggerated, or reimagined in the next. Distortion here is not a rejection of likeness but one of several ways of looking closely, what happens to presence when proportion is abandoned, when surface is exaggerated, when the familiar body is made strange? Equally, what does it mean to simply look, and render what is seen, with care? The artists in this room treat the figure as both subject and material, capable of holding resemblance, tension, and unease all at once.
Shreyas Karle turns absurdity into psychological inquiry, his A/C Man series comments on industrialization and mass-production and their normalization in our daily lives. T Venkanna’s Naughty Nighty at Night turns an ordinary nightgown into a densely layered landscape of desire and fantasy. With its wearer absent, the garment becomes a surrogate body, covered in faces, eyes, and suggestive forms, its scattered eyes evoking an omnipresent gaze that blurs looking and being looked at.
Vidha Saumya’s The flowers from her hair kept falling till they could fall no more, so they decided to walk explores both the anxiety of exposing the body and the freedom that comes with stepping outside its prescribed roles. Hardev Chauhan brings together farming and tailoring in watercolours of thread, fabric and botanicals. In Mannequin, these histories are stitched directly into the picture plane. Shailee Mehta’s Tiring Day at the Theatre (Green Room) considers performance and role-playing in womanhood, questioning the difference between private self and public persona.
Kalam Patua, who revived Kalighat painting, renders figures in a rather contemporary Gandhari Overlooking the World. N. S. Harsha talks about the politics of agrarian life after India opened its door to globalisation, Pleasure Of Being Eclipsed In Not Forever talks about the globalisation of 5 senses of humans. K. G. Subramanyan’s visual meditations contemplated human subjects and objects as distinct forms, especially in his Untitled work, where he blends romanticism and eroticism with western cubist influences. Vikrant Bhise places the struggle against caste-based domination at the centre of his practice, and in Grapple 4, he weaves the Ambedkarite movement’s archival memory, intergenerational lived experience and present-day civic resistance into his work.
