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Lot Essay
In a career spanning more than fifty years, Nalini Malani has experimented with several genres and mediums, including painting, reverse painting on perspex, photographic art, theatre, video, sound and large-scale installation. The artist’s early paintings, from the 1970s and 80s, feature men and women drawn from her surroundings in Mumbai, particularly from the dense Lohar Chawl neighborhood where her studio was located at the time. The figures that populate these works are members of the large families that live together in cramped homes, and Malani attempts to express their lives and aspirations in her work. These large paintings also explore the limitations of narrative within a single frame, referencing Malani’s experience with cinema and art-books as alternate forms of expression that allowed for continuous, more nuanced descriptions.
This painting from 1979 is part of a series of works titled His Life. Discussing this series, the artist recalls, “I tried to make a series that resembled characters in a novel. Writers work with ‘time’ to flesh out their characters. As a painter one only has the single frame to work with - so I decided to create personages that could tell their story over several paintings. The protagonist is a middle class business man from Lohar Chawl Bombay. Hence the title of the series - I wanted to get the ‘feel’ of such a character who would be so different from what I was familiar with. And the stories that unfold are about his family and professional life. Sometimes we see the scenario from the women’s point of view and sometimes that of the child. In this setting archetypal roles are played out much like in a Greek tragedy, the servants being the chorus - that perceives all.” (Correspondence with the artist, August 2017)
Today, Malani is one of the most respected representatives of Contemporary South Asian Art around the globe, and a major retrospective of her work, The Rebellion of the Dead, is scheduled to open at Centre Pompidou, Paris, this October. Her works have also been shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017), Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey (2017), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2014), the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (2014), the Asia Society, New York (2014). Other international museums that have shown Malani’s work include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007), the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2005-06), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) and the Tate Modern, London (2001).
This painting from 1979 is part of a series of works titled His Life. Discussing this series, the artist recalls, “I tried to make a series that resembled characters in a novel. Writers work with ‘time’ to flesh out their characters. As a painter one only has the single frame to work with - so I decided to create personages that could tell their story over several paintings. The protagonist is a middle class business man from Lohar Chawl Bombay. Hence the title of the series - I wanted to get the ‘feel’ of such a character who would be so different from what I was familiar with. And the stories that unfold are about his family and professional life. Sometimes we see the scenario from the women’s point of view and sometimes that of the child. In this setting archetypal roles are played out much like in a Greek tragedy, the servants being the chorus - that perceives all.” (Correspondence with the artist, August 2017)
Today, Malani is one of the most respected representatives of Contemporary South Asian Art around the globe, and a major retrospective of her work, The Rebellion of the Dead, is scheduled to open at Centre Pompidou, Paris, this October. Her works have also been shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017), Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey (2017), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2014), the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (2014), the Asia Society, New York (2014). Other international museums that have shown Malani’s work include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007), the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2005-06), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) and the Tate Modern, London (2001).