Important Notice

Lot 18

The Devanagri text on this painting refers to the interplay between the villain and the protagonist in the 70's Bollywood film, Sholay, which has now become an icon of Indian popular cinema. A climactic scene in the film reveals that the villain, Gabbar Singh, has, with a sword, violently amputated both arms of the darkly benevolent former police officer, Thakur. It is interesting that Nair has interpolated an icon from Indian history, a... The Devanagri text on this painting refers to the interplay between the villain and the protagonist in the 70's Bollywood film, Sholay, which has now become an icon of Indian popular cinema. A climactic scene in the film reveals that the villain, Gabbar Singh, has, with a sword, violently amputated both arms of the darkly benevolent former police officer, Thakur. It is interesting that Nair has interpolated an icon from Indian history, a sculptural representation of King Kanishka from the Kushan Dynasty (AD 78 – AD 144) to depict the protagonist. By incorporating the 'dialogue' Nair subverts the 'high' art to the masses. The iconisation of this image through the characters is so complete and the universality of their message so entrenched through mass cinema, that they continue to pervade the moral sensibility of present day Indian popular culture in an almost cult-like fashion.

"In Surendran Nair, we see the emergence of parallel visual lexicons that challenge memory and association…Surendran’s context is his country and its protean facility for the evolved religious image. What he does is to exploit this avidity for invention for entirely subversive ends. He fastidiously picks at the icon even as he decontextualizes it, and renders it as both fixed and changeable paradigm in his field of play. Surendran's language plays upon the religious and the popular icon. Liberally sprinkled with visual and literary puns the icon becomes the surrealist object of fancy, which can pleasure or main the body, or render it a field for the enactment of puns."(Gayatri Sinha, COMBINE Voices for the New Century, vis-à-vis & Art Inc., 2000)

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