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Studio 6 : Saloni's Room
After the long procession through conflict, interiority, flesh, landscape, and scale, the exhibition closes where the collection began: with Saloni herself. Here the figure is no longer observed from a distance but felt as a presence behind the collection, in her passion for collecting, her anxieties, and her successes in the art world. This room reminds us that a collection is a kind of self-portrait: what a person gathers, and what they are given, says as much about them as any likeness could. Behind every collection is a person, with all the tenderness, doubt, and persistence that implies.
T Venkanna’s Untitled, in watercolour and collage, suspends a skull, scattered red marks, and ghostly figures in a loose, stained field of colour. The seemingly spontaneous dispersal of pigment contrasts with the deliberate precision of the figures, setting chance against intention and playfulness against mortality, a tension that sits easily beside the anxieties and successes of a life in art.
Laxma Goud’s portraits favour a dynamic Indian ethos over individual likeness, rendered with the rustic, potent line that has defined his printmaking for six decades. My Love, Saloni is personal in a different way. The etching is shown here along with its plate, a gift to Saloni from the artist after he discovered her passion early in her career, and she often credits it as the starting point of her journey as a collector.
Sonia Jose’s Self Portrait (with clothes pins) turns the intimate, overlooked circumstances of routine life inward. The clothes pin is a humble domestic object, made for holding things in place, and here it raises the questions of value, ownership, and identity that run through the whole room: what we hold on to, and what holds on to us. Rendered in deep physical and mental pain, the portrait is the room’s most exposed moment, the cost that sits behind the act of gathering and the anxiety that accompanies every success in a life in art.
