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Lot Essay
Nalini Malani has become one of the representative voices of Contemporary South Asian Art around the globe, currently exhibiting at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, and at the Asia Society's, Nalini Malani: Tansgressions. She has also exhibited at numerous museums and bienals across the world including Tate Modern (2001), the 8th Istanbul Biennale (2003), the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2003), Peabody Essex Museum (2005-06), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2007).
Born in Karachi in 1946, she experienced the violence of India's Partition as a young woman, and her art responds to the stridence of post-Independence nationalist rhetoric. For nearly two decades, Malani has sustained a dialogue on historical narratives by filtering religious and historical imagery ubiquitous in South Asia through her creative lens, unsparingly critiquing jingoism and the ills of nationalist agendas.
Malani's oeuvre is marked by the use of iconographies with rich cultural associations. She wrenches them free from their expected contexts, placing them in multi-directional narratives open to multiple interpretations. Though the figures enact chaos, the pale grid lines impose a sense of structure and order, alternately suggesting and denying narrative linearity. The allegorical portrayal of Radha and Krishna borrows from the mythical story of Radha, a married woman who is a lover of Krishna. Malani critiques post-Independence efforts to sanitize Indian and Hindu stories that feature characters such as Radha, or Sita, or in the non-Indian context, Medea - complex women who resist easy attributions of goodness or badness or purity and impurity. Their significance lies in their complexity.
The composition of Ecstasy of Radha 2 recalls medieval paintings and cosmological maps, using a palette of yellows, reds, ochres and blues. Malani's whimsically rendered figures varyingly pose across a maze-like gridded plane. Although bearing a certain Pop appeal, such banality is offset by her embrace of the grotesque. The figures that occupy her work appear sore and battered as they fight, love, and live in the grid. Through the complexity of form and content, she invites the viewer to peer closer and reassess stories that have been cleansed to accommodate varying political agendas.
Malani first learned the technique of reverse painting on glass while working alongside the artist Bhupen Khakhar in the 1980s, which she later applied to mylar. The reflective surface emboldens the colors, adding greater physicality and materiality to her subjects, and forcing the viewer to reckon with his or her own reflection. In the mid-2000s, in works such as Sita/Medea (2004) and this triptych, she explores the surface as a terrestrial map, imposing lines onto the scattered scenes. The use of mapping marks the introduction of new narrative forms to Nalini Malani's oeuvre, in which the groupings of characters and events are drawn together into a larger visually connected plot. Featured in multiple publications and exhibited internationally, The Ecstasy of Radha 2 is recognized as a landmark painting and a pivotal moment in Malani's artistic career.
Born in Karachi in 1946, she experienced the violence of India's Partition as a young woman, and her art responds to the stridence of post-Independence nationalist rhetoric. For nearly two decades, Malani has sustained a dialogue on historical narratives by filtering religious and historical imagery ubiquitous in South Asia through her creative lens, unsparingly critiquing jingoism and the ills of nationalist agendas.
Malani's oeuvre is marked by the use of iconographies with rich cultural associations. She wrenches them free from their expected contexts, placing them in multi-directional narratives open to multiple interpretations. Though the figures enact chaos, the pale grid lines impose a sense of structure and order, alternately suggesting and denying narrative linearity. The allegorical portrayal of Radha and Krishna borrows from the mythical story of Radha, a married woman who is a lover of Krishna. Malani critiques post-Independence efforts to sanitize Indian and Hindu stories that feature characters such as Radha, or Sita, or in the non-Indian context, Medea - complex women who resist easy attributions of goodness or badness or purity and impurity. Their significance lies in their complexity.
The composition of Ecstasy of Radha 2 recalls medieval paintings and cosmological maps, using a palette of yellows, reds, ochres and blues. Malani's whimsically rendered figures varyingly pose across a maze-like gridded plane. Although bearing a certain Pop appeal, such banality is offset by her embrace of the grotesque. The figures that occupy her work appear sore and battered as they fight, love, and live in the grid. Through the complexity of form and content, she invites the viewer to peer closer and reassess stories that have been cleansed to accommodate varying political agendas.
Malani first learned the technique of reverse painting on glass while working alongside the artist Bhupen Khakhar in the 1980s, which she later applied to mylar. The reflective surface emboldens the colors, adding greater physicality and materiality to her subjects, and forcing the viewer to reckon with his or her own reflection. In the mid-2000s, in works such as Sita/Medea (2004) and this triptych, she explores the surface as a terrestrial map, imposing lines onto the scattered scenes. The use of mapping marks the introduction of new narrative forms to Nalini Malani's oeuvre, in which the groupings of characters and events are drawn together into a larger visually connected plot. Featured in multiple publications and exhibited internationally, The Ecstasy of Radha 2 is recognized as a landmark painting and a pivotal moment in Malani's artistic career.