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Lot 3

 

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Baiju Parthan, originally trained as an engineer, uses his painting to comment on contemporary society and the various human relationships that contribute to its structure. According to the critic Ranjit Hoskote, "The philosophical question to which Parthan’s art is addressed is: How can the schizophrenia that afflicts Everyman – induced by the sharpened contradictions of contemporary life – be overcome? How can the varying inner natures of the... Baiju Parthan, originally trained as an engineer, uses his painting to comment on contemporary society and the various human relationships that contribute to its structure. According to the critic Ranjit Hoskote, "The philosophical question to which Parthan’s art is addressed is: How can the schizophrenia that afflicts Everyman – induced by the sharpened contradictions of contemporary life – be overcome? How can the varying inner natures of the individual be brought into accord, into a condition of empathy among themselves?" (Brahma’s Homepage: Paintings, Objects and Cyber Stuff, Lakeeren Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1999, unpaginated).

In the present lot, Parthan uses the format of a diptych, where each panel is a slightly altered mirror image of the other, to question the markers used in contemporary society to define identity, including gender and religion. Juxtaposing these with the complex, and often mixed nature of individual identity, the artist seems to suggest that the lines dividing male and female, circle and square are no more than thin, grey social constructs. By pigeonholing individual identity into these rigidly structured frames, the ‘schizophrenia’ of contemporary existence is exacerbated rather than surmounted.

"In developing his darkly glowing allegories, Parthan has deliberately placed himself at a tangent to the main thrust of contemporary Indian art practice; at the same time, he has maintained his linkages with a global movement that may best be described as techno-shamanism. In consequence, while he may appear to be out of step with history in his thorough-going espousal of the magical realm, he is entirely in synchrony with that secret history of our age which is being shaped in the cave-sites and runways of the Net" (Ibid.).

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