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Lot 39

 

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Nataraj Sharma's art often explores the relationship between man and machine in today's industrialised age, where direct contact between the two is unavoidable. Visually dramatic and overwhelming in both scale and subject matter, his works allude to the unpredictable yet inevitable confluences of nature, civilisation and industrialisation. His factory interiors and urbanscapes seem to underscore the reality of such developments, touted as... Nataraj Sharma's art often explores the relationship between man and machine in today's industrialised age, where direct contact between the two is unavoidable. Visually dramatic and overwhelming in both scale and subject matter, his works allude to the unpredictable yet inevitable confluences of nature, civilisation and industrialisation. His factory interiors and urbanscapes seem to underscore the reality of such developments, touted as 'progress,' distilling them to their basics, and in doing so, revealing more complex interactions. These works mirror a sensibility and sensitivity that acknowledges the fast changing contemporary world, but also questions the socio-economic and political repercussions of this heady, never-ending project..br.
The artist's fascination with machines began when he moved to Baroda, Gujarat, in 1994 to teach art, and encountered construction and upheaval in a rapidly gentrifying city. He was interested in the "transgressed and transforming landscape" and the mechanisms behind it. In his own words: "Objects have a still life, a permanence and a consistency that stands in contrast to the fickleness of human exchange. Look at objects and they look back without blinking...They say: 'Reveal us and we will reveal you.'"(Grant Watson, "Simulated Realities and Virtual Experience," Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, p. 113)

In the present lot, Sharma depicts a bleak, shadowy interior backlit against a phosphorescent green background, which he separates into three panels. At the centre of this composition is a seated man surrounded by an array of machines, ranging from simple, everyday objects such as a ceiling fan, to complex, heavy machinery for industrial use. "The representation of the human form trapped within structures larger and more powerful than itself takes on a sense of the monumental in Sharma's many paintings of machinery and factories... Sometimes the artist presents these machines as contradictory objects which on the one hand adhere to the logic of orderliness and productivity and on the other to the whimsy and playfulness of artistic fancy." (Watson, p. 102)

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