Important Notice

Nataraj Sharma's move from Bangalore to Baroda in the 1990s brought about a striking transformation in his creative process and body of work. Unlike his early figurative canvases that highlighted various aspects of the human condition through the lives of city dwellers and labourers, his Baroda works, almost always executed on paper, were populated by displaced machine parts and barren, industrial landscapes. Reflecting on this change, the... Nataraj Sharma's move from Bangalore to Baroda in the 1990s brought about a striking transformation in his creative process and body of work. Unlike his early figurative canvases that highlighted various aspects of the human condition through the lives of city dwellers and labourers, his Baroda works, almost always executed on paper, were populated by displaced machine parts and barren, industrial landscapes. Reflecting on this change, the artist says, “Moving to the outskirts of this city in western India, I was confronted with a primal, elemental landscape dotted by factories that looked extremely desolate in the summer. The world might be at the forefront of technology but for us these outdated factories and chunky machines are an everyday reality. I am not here to make moralistic statements about our oil-stained and garbage strewn landscapes. I want to seek the peculiar beauty of these desolate structures. Their permanence is comforting” (as quoted in Real in Realism, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, unpaginated).

Commenting on the nature of time and exposing the effects of its passing, Sharma combines the various industrial scenes and factory components that he sketches or photographs to create what he terms fantastic and “composite industrial structure[s]” (Ibid.). In the present lot, titled Deconstructing Time, the artist lifts machine parts out of their normal industrial environment and places them in a surreal mechanical arrangement, perhaps a device intended to break-down or alter time and, consequently, reverse the fate of its abandoned components.

Here, the machine parts float against a midnight-blue grid, at once poetic and disquieting. The grid itself is both a tool in the structuring of the piece and an intrinsic element of its message of continuity, fragmentation, dislocation and decay. Sharma explains, “The grid helps me order space within my painting, so foremost it is a tool and I use it, like say a Renaissance artist did. I do not have to deal with the uncontrolled length and breadth of the canvas, the grid gives me space in little tablets. It is very useful when I have to transfer a small image from my sketchbook on to a large canvas. But I go beyond to use it as a metaphor as well…Sometimes I paint the grid after the work is done. It becomes like a second skin, suffocating the painting” (Ibid.).

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