N S Harsha
(1969)
Nations
N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. “Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful...
N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. “Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. As the miniature painting format has regularly been used to highlight social and political inequities, Harsha’s reference to them represents an embrace of the tradition updated by his personal idiom to embody contemporary conditions” (Savita Apte and Rebecca Morrill, Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, p. 98). Using the devices of multiplicity and reiteration, the artist populates canvases of epic proportions with minutely detailed figures and motifs, each one unique and painstakingly detailed. This juxtaposition of scale and content engages viewers from a distance, drawing them closer and closer till they begin to question the oppositional concepts of diversity and divisiveness, community and individualism, and personal and global politics that the artist grappled with in creating the pieces. In the present lot, a monumental triptych, “Harsha looks at the broader context of ‘Nations’ whose separate identity is defined by governmental agencies to be absorbed and yet simultaneously undermined by the chaotic tanglement of living. Here he juxtaposes as well as links the object and concept of the national flag with human effort understood through the metaphor of labour. The process of official image-construction becomes examined by interpretative portraying of it and by confronting it with its grass-roots reality.” “The expansive triptych carries small paintings of sewing machines on which flags belonging to the 192 countries of the UN are being made…The painting holds regular rows of uniform-size sewing machines, graceful and animated, with a number of empty spaces for new entrants. Their literal, slightly naive rendering in one perspective view recalls document charts and didactic school book illustrations which carry the sincerity of their message. Bureaucratic requirements, however, have to be implemented by live workers, and even though they are absent in these pictures, the objects of their labour seem to contain their spirit. Each flag cloth drapes in a slightly different manner, as if spread or gathered by the hand of the tailor who left during a break and will soon resume his stitching. Under the partial translucency of the acrylics, the lucidity of the symbolic colour fields begins to blur and merge along the edges appearing to turn into some other shapes. The bright hues in the scraps of fabric on the floor lighten and stir almost like motifs in a lyrical, vivid abstraction where the once geographically designated colours meet and mix together” (Marta Jakimowicz, N.S. Harsha at SHContemporary, Sakshi Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2007).
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Lot
54
of
110
SPRING AUCTION 2009
11-12 MARCH 2009
Estimate
Rs 1,25,00,000 - 1,50,00,000
$250,000 - 300,000
Winning Bid
Rs 1,00,62,500
$201,250
(Inclusive of Buyer's Premium)
ARTWORK DETAILS
N S Harsha
Nations
Signed and dated in English (lower right and verso)
2007
Acrylic on canvs
65.5 x 341 in
166.4 x 866.1 cm
(Triptych)
EXHIBITED AND PUBLISHED:
Nations, Sakshi Art Gallery at ShContemporary, Shanghai, 2007
PUBLISHED:
Johny ML, "(United) Nations Ltd.", Artconcerns.com, October 2007
Category: Painting
Style: Figurative