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Lot 54

 

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Anjolie Ela Menon is one of India's foremost women Modernists and is lauded for her patina and sepia-toned works. Her deliberate stylistic choice heightens their impact and plays in favour of the central theme of a large body of her works-women subject to unspoken or tabooed horrors.

Menon's paintings often assume a voyeuristic feel; subjects are captured in private, vulnerable moments, unaware that they are being watched. In the... Anjolie Ela Menon is one of India's foremost women Modernists and is lauded for her patina and sepia-toned works. Her deliberate stylistic choice heightens their impact and plays in favour of the central theme of a large body of her works-women subject to unspoken or tabooed horrors.

Menon's paintings often assume a voyeuristic feel; subjects are captured in private, vulnerable moments, unaware that they are being watched. In the present work, female forms emerge from the recesses of ultramarine and midnight blues, plagued by unknown traumas. Melancholic in their delicacy of form, they appear spectre-like: eyes shut, hollowed out, or staring back at the viewer in terror. Cryptic symbols fill in the gaps; the discs and clothespin could allude to domesticity. The hastily sketched naughts and crosses in the upper right could perhaps imply a game being played out by a more powerful player who remains absent from the scene.

One of the most integral elements of this work is the frame. Menon uses it to simulate peering through a window, forcing the viewer to play both voyeur and sympathiser. She began exploring the possibilities of form and composition using windows in the 1970s. This prompted her to search for old windows and doors in Mumbai's lakkar bazaar, where she stumbled upon ornate windows that once belonged in Parsi mansions. She pared down their ornateness and arrived at simple grid frames. She experimented with the frame to deconstruct the familiar and real, and opened up new visual avenues. In this painting, the frame presents a fragmented view of the scene unfolding indoors, heightening the viewer's sense of unease.

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