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Lot Essay
Living and working in the pluralistic urban environment of Mumbai, Jitish Kallat draws upon the visual cultures of the city to represent multiplicity in the daily existence of Mumbaikars. His vivid figurative paintings serve as both a celebration of the city as well as a political critique of socio-economic divides across the nation. Kallat’s oeuvre is vast in its exploration of both processes and themes; his paintings can range from a close up and magnification of a single object or person to larger and chaotic urbanscapes.
"The paintings are all foreground, with a certain matte-ness that is both a surface effect and an aspect of the mediated condition of the material (newspaper photographs, images on the internet) that he has been prone to use. The urchins, street waifs, child labourers, crowds, and urban flotsam that his iconographic repertory has been consistently partial to, are treated in a manner suggestive of a blown-up photographic negative or pixelized image with the eye needing to adjust itself to a kind of reversed figure/ground relationship […] The riddling aspect is underscored not only by the cryptic and often ironic titles (accompanied by the artist’s name and the copyright symbol) stencilled on the picture surface but also globalized demotic of the ‘highways of communication’ - the signage glut of the computer screen - that festoons, punctuates, interrupts the interface of the 'real' and the 'virtual' that is 'Kallat's window on the world'" (D. Ananth, 'Scare Quotes: Jitish Kallat's 'AgitPop'', Jitish Kallat Rickshawpolis, New Delhi, 2005, p. 4).
Kallat exposes the idiosyncrasies of mechanical reproduction by magnifying and revealing the grainy resolution and cropped composition of news clippings and internet printouts. Following the aesthetic sensibilities of Pop Art, he collapses the picture plane, giving his viewer no refuge from his subaltern subject matter, which flickers between the genial imagery of the everyday billboard and the violence of the agitprop posters as it confronts its audience. The second of his Exile series of works painted in 1999, the present lot tackles the trauma of violence and its residual implications on the everyday lives of those existing at the margins of society.
"The paintings are all foreground, with a certain matte-ness that is both a surface effect and an aspect of the mediated condition of the material (newspaper photographs, images on the internet) that he has been prone to use. The urchins, street waifs, child labourers, crowds, and urban flotsam that his iconographic repertory has been consistently partial to, are treated in a manner suggestive of a blown-up photographic negative or pixelized image with the eye needing to adjust itself to a kind of reversed figure/ground relationship […] The riddling aspect is underscored not only by the cryptic and often ironic titles (accompanied by the artist’s name and the copyright symbol) stencilled on the picture surface but also globalized demotic of the ‘highways of communication’ - the signage glut of the computer screen - that festoons, punctuates, interrupts the interface of the 'real' and the 'virtual' that is 'Kallat's window on the world'" (D. Ananth, 'Scare Quotes: Jitish Kallat's 'AgitPop'', Jitish Kallat Rickshawpolis, New Delhi, 2005, p. 4).
Kallat exposes the idiosyncrasies of mechanical reproduction by magnifying and revealing the grainy resolution and cropped composition of news clippings and internet printouts. Following the aesthetic sensibilities of Pop Art, he collapses the picture plane, giving his viewer no refuge from his subaltern subject matter, which flickers between the genial imagery of the everyday billboard and the violence of the agitprop posters as it confronts its audience. The second of his Exile series of works painted in 1999, the present lot tackles the trauma of violence and its residual implications on the everyday lives of those existing at the margins of society.