1X1 Art Gallery to exhibit a collective of Indian contemporary artists at Art Paris 2008

Notes and media contacts

Biju Joze:

"My work at present is driven by ethical and moral concerns regarding ecology, technology and science, and arises out of my experience of an urban/global yet cultural Indian context. Animal rights, genetic engineering, hybridizing techniques are some issues that spur me on. My concepts often grow out of an activism against these experiences - frequently a kind of record comprising visual representations of my encounters with real situations. I unconsciously use metaphors and symbols from memory as equivalents of an observed reality; that these are from my cultural background reiterates the Indian-ness of my work. Irony and paradox become tools with which I engage with the audience and they also make my subjects visually palatable," says Joze.

Finding more fulfillments in sculpture and installations, he uses a variety of media ranging from steel, fiberglass, found objects and such conventional materials to locally sourced organic material like betel leaves, arca nut, tobacco leaves etc that one may easily identify as being very "Indian". Biju Jose has followed a long path to arrive at the architecture of the organic; firstly, by experimenting with organic materials and their suggestive potentials, then with objects signifying a double edge, by tweaking the ready-mades and likes and also by building funny suggestive objects with wires.

Biju Jose, born in 1972, Biju did his BFA in sculpture from College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore. Masters of Fine Arts (Sculpture ) Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U. Baroda in 1999. In 2000 UNIDEE - Universities of Ideas,Cittadellarte Foundazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy.


Bose Krishnamachari:

The French artist Christian Boltanski once remarked: "The task is to create a formal work that is at the same time recognized by the spectator as a sentimentally charged object. Everyone brings his own history to it."
Possibly Bose Krishnamachari's current project as an artist too is to present the viewer with a trigger point of images/icons that can, (along with the formal construction of painting/installation), function as symbolic devices with which to speak of an entire culture, its shifting mindsets and, its eclectic borrowings.

Born in Kerala in 1963, Bose recently completed his MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work, thus reinforced by a 'here and now' understanding and awareness of contemporary culture, borrows effortlessly from various disciplines, including literature and design, and time periods.

Interestingly, Bose pays as much attention to form as he does to conceptual and/or contextual concerns. Startling planes of flat color juxtaposed against skilful, almost photographic, representations of identifiable persona, imbue the work with an 'international' sensibility. Bose admits to combining western image-making techniques (such as the installation) with the vernacular, in a bid to arrive at an idiom that is entirely contemporary and brisk. In an earlier interview, he has said: "I refine my color to brightness. I have learnt this usage from the alternately subdued and lavish color codes of Indian ceremonies and ritual performances; the costumes, the gestures of enactment..."


Chittrovanu Mazumdar:

Since the early 1980s, Chittrovanu Mazumdar has explored varied media and technologies in his work. Through three decades of exploration and seeking he has continuously reinvented himself, and remains today one of the country's most thinking artists, fusing the cerebral with the sensual in a way uniquely his own.
His range of references is vast, incorporating as it does varied inputs from his own culturally rich upbringing in Kolkata and Paris. He has been at the vanguard of contemporary Indian art from his very first solo exhibition, respected by fellow artist, critics and art lovers alike.
In every successive body of work, Chittrovanu Mazumdar has surprised his viewers with changes. From the painterly canvases with which he began his career, every show has moved in a new direction, using industrial material, eschewing canvas for built and constructed works in space, using technology of all kinds to experiment intensely with metal, sound and light.

Underlying his many shifts in medium, form and style over the years is a constant: a sensual intensity that reaches past the clever and the quick to probe deep layers of the human experience in all its tragi-comic universality - archetype, myth, memory, desire, betrayal, longing, ecstasy and pain.
His works speak of human paradox and ambiguity, of the seeping grey of daily life that escapes the purity of black and white. What appears to link the very visually and formally different phases of his work is the intensity of sensual immersion demanded by the artist of both himself and the viewer.


Justin Ponmany:

Justin Ponmany was born in Kerala in 1974, but has always lived and worked in Bombay. In fashioning himself as citizen and artist in a demanding, even inflammable metropolitan context, he seeks out implements that are robustly industrial-grade or pungently artisanal. His relatively unorthodox materials include resin, epoxy, hologram foil and printing ink; the photographs that he takes of people and sites as he walks or drives around Bombay serve him as working drawings. His aesthetic combines the grittiness of everyday technologies of communication and protocols of iteration with the lyricism of a meditation on self, place, time, decay and survival.
The city that Ponmany invokes, with its saltpans and abandoned textile mills, pylons and sagging power lines, is a lifeworld that sustains the improvisation of various identities. The street is Ponmany.s preferred metaphor for the artist.s life: his self-image is that of the commuter in transit, caught in the maelstrom of traffic. For him, the pause before a closed shutter or at the traffic signals marks a moment of repose, a temporary rupture of the pervasive speed that shapes the world by force.
Through his riddling combinations of silvery hologram foil and rich pigment, his allusions to an archive of memory now available only in misted, blurred snapshots, Ponmany recalls us to the paradox of the postmodern moment: to the fact that individual experience today is profoundly intimate and unshareable, and yet can be publicly broadcast to anonymous auditors and viewers, through an email list, a blog, or a billboard. If the eyes, patched or forced wide open and posted with malign swastikas, mark one aspect of our present, Ponmany suggests, its other side is incarnated by the brain on which surgery is being performed, a slice of memory being extracted, a chip being implanted in its place.


N. N. Rimzon:

N. N. Rimzon was born in Kerala's Kakkoor village in 1957. He studied sculpture at the College of Fine Arts in Trivandrum and followed it up with an M.A. in the subject from Baroda's M.S. University. He also studied in the Royal College of Art in London with the help of an Inlaks scholarship.

His early works in the mid '70s seem to reflect the concerns emanating from the leftist and radical background in Kerala. As a result he moved away from narrative painting to experiment with conceptual sculpture. The sculptor's later work reveal postmodernist nuances in their attitudes, but the social-radical statement continues as an important motif.
With his sculptures, arranged in an installation-like space, energised by various contradictions of size, colour, setting etc. he directs the viewer to a complex experience of his imagining. Inspired by Ram Kinker Baij, German realism and expressionist figuration, he exaggerates and then distorts his figures.
Speaking Stones (1998) highlights the atrocities and massacres that have been a part of Indian history post independence. Here one sees a man crouching with his bowed head in his hands, surrounded by a large circle of flintlike rocks.
 Photographs of various incidents of communal violence in India, ranging from the partition in 1947 to demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, are placed under these rocks.
It is the picture of the common man who mourns the contemporary state of society and is fed up with violence, intolerance, hatred, agitations, fury and fanaticism. The rocks are sharp stones piercing the conscience of the common man. These are giant paperweights holding down a short history of communal violence.

Vivek Vilasini:

Born 1964, Trishur, Kerala.
Vilasini began his career as a radio officer in the Navy, he then studied political science at the University of Kerala before training in sculptural practices from traditional Indian craftsmen, which marked the beginning of his artistic practice. This atypical career naturally led him to a strong interest in multimedia techniques.

With "Between one shore and several others", Vivek Vilasini seems to capture the flavor of the "serving-hatch" world of globalization. He explains, emphasizing that his goal is not to debate its benefits and drawbacks, but simply to describe it. Vivek participated in "India: Public Places, Private Spaces", an exhibit held at the Newark Museum in New Jersey including 27 photographers and video artists. This exhibit explored the vitality of contemporary Indian art born of economic and political change, the invasive influence of media, and the rivalry between cultural traditions and globalization.
He now lives and works in Bangalore.

Hema Upadhyay:

Hema is an artist of current times. Upadhyay's works use two media, photography and painting. Her paintings refer often to home, not as a place of security, but to address a sense of dislocation, of people wanting a root but being violently pulled and pushed out. Dislocation is a worldwide condition although the artist uses domestic (Indian) references.
Completed B.F.A. (Painting) in 1995 and M.F.A. in 1997 from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. Hema Upadhyay.s work is a personal chronicle about the individual perspective of a collective experience, migration and displacement. Ms. Upadhyay.s narrative is not from memory or recollections, as most stories of migration are a look back with pain and anger. Her's is not an emotive tale, it is told in a contemporary, urban and thoughtful voice.
Like the writer, Rohinston Mistry, Upadhyay's works speak strongly of Mumbai (where she migrated to from Baroda), a teeming, multi-cultural and confrontational city where people flock to, in pursuit of their aspirations. She uses her own image (a conscious choice which was reached gradually) because the nature of her portrayal is autobiographical. Although a painter, Hema uses photographs because painting and figuration would bring distortions and extraneous factors to the reading of the imagery, thereby, interfering with what she wants to communicate. In her artwork, she looks at the outside by looking inwards; the telling is not about an external view . gender, caste or religion. The perspective is a personal and inner one. Her works pull in different and often contradictory directions, reflecting an inner state of rootlessness within a fragmented period of time. Her works are sensitive and deeply introspective.


Riyas Komu:

Hailing from Kerala, Komu arrived in Mumbai in 1992. He then joined the JJ School of Art after dropping out from final year of BA Literature. The decision to make painting his career came only after he had spent a few years at the JJ School in the company of contemporaries like Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari, Justin Ponmany and Girsh Dahiwale.

Komu is keen on sort of "ringing alarm bells" about the explosive urban situation through his art. His work refers to the paradoxes of the urban situation where on one hand, there is the glamour and on the other, abject poverty. He paints with compassion and cynicism. There is some amount of dejection and anguish yet his work reflects hope.

One traces his present concerns to his family. His father's politically leanings must have influenced him. It's not just the desolation of the downtrodden that Komu brings through his work. He also brings out the carefree attitude of a certain section of society. He wants to alleviate those who have an endless energy to survive, to overcome disasters even while applauding the strength of the people to just carry on and lead an unconditional life.
In the midst of a metropolis that carries on despite innumerable hurdles and thrives despite the biggest of disasters, Komu's work is a tribute to the spirit of those who survive against all odds.


Shibu Natesan:

Shibu Natesans paintings, with their affirmation of realistic representation, mirror the complexity and ambivalence of art practice in India today. At a time when installation art with its in-built negation of easel painting, has drawn in the younger artists, Natesan convictions, as conceptual as those of his peers, are mobilized in painting after painting Š often featuring the human figure in the medium of oil on canvas and water colour on paper. Each work, vastly different in subject matter from the other, portrays a person, a situation, a building and interior or exterior scenes. Connecting them all is an acute distillation of the given moment, of a deeply haunting sense of stilled time, of an intimation of some dark, imminent crisis.

A central part of his painting practice involves the quest for a resonant image that refuses to be read directly and which obliges the viewer to make an interpretation. The invitation given to the viewer to take an active stance in relation to the painting is often a political one even when the subject matter is not obviously so.
Shibu Natesan chooses to work as a realist using two strategies Š directness and detachment. His details tie his subjects to a concrete reality but this perfection adds a certain detachment or emotional distancing. Viewing Natesan's paintings and reading Marquez create a similar presence of magical realism. Natesan's realness is literal but yet it does not seem familiar. His canvasses are spaces inhabited by the presence of a felt absence.

Through the symbolism, the viewer is encouraged to shift and re-focus their gaze, and in many instances, to re-address their own socio-political beliefs. Topics of focus range from power structures and moral breakdown to racism and the predicament of the migrant.
As can be seen from his work that Natesan use images from various sources, real and photographic, and an important aspect of his referencing is the freedom to use images from different cultures and periods of history. Through this freedom he is able to explore the complex structures of contemporary life. We are constantly bombarded by images from everywhere and this frames our world view. At the same time he is very deliberate in the choice of images he uses and he is in a constant process whereby he deepens his understanding of his cultural background and the way it defines his perceptions.

Natesan injects his realism with a sense of irony, and often humour, seamlessly juxtaposing the everyday with unexpected symbols to unbalance the viewer's initial perceptions.


For more information contact 1x1 Art Gallery:

Tel: 04 348 3873