Important Notice

Prajakta Palav is an artist of the intimate and the ordinary; forsaking complex narratives and layers of metaphor, Palav's quirky work exposes the beauty inherent in the irregular and commonplace. To Palav, "beauty is not a utopian ideal that can only flourish when we suppress all news of the septic tank of humanity. Her art grows from the gift of apperception, conscious and reflective looking, which blurs the distinctions between real and... Prajakta Palav is an artist of the intimate and the ordinary; forsaking complex narratives and layers of metaphor, Palav's quirky work exposes the beauty inherent in the irregular and commonplace. To Palav, "beauty is not a utopian ideal that can only flourish when we suppress all news of the septic tank of humanity. Her art grows from the gift of apperception, conscious and reflective looking, which blurs the distinctions between real and synthetic, nature and artifice" (Nancy Adajania, "Bonsais or Bullets: Prajakta Palav's Oblique Portraits of the Middle Class", Corners, Gallery Beyond exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2005, unpaginated).

In her series of works titled Kachra or garbage, Palav has carried her almost irreverent aesthetic forward from the perfect domestic interiors where she disclosed concealed indiscretions and probed the notion of desire, to public rubbish dumps outside, where everyone's undesired refuse lies in plain sight. In the present lot, a close-up of a vivid recycling dump, the artist challenges her viewers' conceptions of beauty, desire and the frameworks they inhabit. As Adajania explains, "…this is art that takes garbage as its subject, and yet achieves beauty. Since the refuse is represented in extreme close-ups, it ceases to have caste inflections and loses connotations of ecological threat. Instead, one could say that Palav transforms these images into pattern-based abstractions…Thus intimately framed, the synthetic materials appear natural, or then like elements of a fantasia" (Ibid.).

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