Lot Essay
My work is informed by history, mythology, real and imaginary events, art history, notions of tradition and identity and its relationship with modernity, language, sexuality, politics, and other faiths, etc. Without emphasizing any of these in particular, I address these issues simultaneously. I create a vocabulary of images that are fed from a variety of sources and this offers me rich and diverse parables of reference to structure connectives and marry evocative associations of meaning. The images are often like cryptic clues, which assist one to decode the invested meaning that is disguised through oblique and elaborate devices of representation.
Surendran Nair (Artist Statement, written on the occasion of the exhibition The Bad Behavior of Singularities, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, January 2006, see: Horn Please, Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 2007, p. 154)
Surendran Nair (Artist Statement, written on the occasion of the exhibition The Bad Behavior of Singularities, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, January 2006, see: Horn Please, Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 2007, p. 154)