RASHID RANA (B. 1968)
RASHID RANA (B. 1968)

The World is Not Enough

Details
RASHID RANA (B. 1968)
The World is Not Enough
digital cibachrome print mounted on Diasec; four panel
97 x 29 in. (246.4 x 73.6 cm.) each; 97 x 116 (246.4 x 294.6 cm.) overall
Executed in 2006 (4)
Provenance
Phillips de Pury & Company London, 18 October 2008, lot 312
Albion Gallery, London
Literature
The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, exhibition catalogue, Saatchi Gallery, 2010, pp. 80-83 (illustrated, unpaginated)
Rashid Rana: A World Apart, Chatterjee & Lal and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010, pp. 114-119 (illustrated)
Exhibited
London, Saatchi Gallery, The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, January - May 2010 (one from the edition)

Lot Essay

Since 2002, Rana has played with notions of duality and gestalt theory, pixilation and digitized imagery."Pixilation is Rana's mode, in that he builds his large prints by amassing thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of smaller images that become 'pixels' in service of a bigger picture. And pixilation is Rana's metaphor, because through the relationship between the larger image and its constituent elements, he leads us to meditations about part and whole, surface and depth, fragment and meaning." (Chatterjee & Lal, accessed January 30, 2012, www.chatterjeeandlal.com/rashid_rana)

"In he World is Not Enough, Rana plays between the realms of illusion and reality in order to illustrate constrasting ideals of perception. Because of its scale, and the fact that the distanced view of this work immediately implies the formalism of an Abstract Expressionist painting, we are first pushed to a transcendental state full of wonder, fantasty, idealism, spirituality, myth, and heroism. But Rana has actually presented the viewer with a subject that connotes none of these epic ideals: garbage.

Rana has taken hundreds of images of trash mostly from a landfills site just outside Lahore, and digitally 'stitched' them into a non-sensical and non-existent aerial view. By using a subject which is overlooked and considered to be worthless Rana presents the viewer with an unresolved problem: the very vision they find so beautiful and transcendent is actually made from the ever-growing waste of society." (M. Hilsman, commenting on he World is not Enough, text courtesy the artist)

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