Important Notice

“Nair populates his paintings with a cast of enigmatic figures that meld the authorial viewpoint with strange, unsettling, sublime or tragic alterities…The swan-man…is an oblique self-image on which the artist has mapped an identification with such marginal persons as members of minorities who possess nominal citizenship of the Republic but do not enjoy any real citizenship rights in an increasingly majoritarian-dominant public sphere. Some... “Nair populates his paintings with a cast of enigmatic figures that meld the authorial viewpoint with strange, unsettling, sublime or tragic alterities…The swan-man…is an oblique self-image on which the artist has mapped an identification with such marginal persons as members of minorities who possess nominal citizenship of the Republic but do not enjoy any real citizenship rights in an increasingly majoritarian-dominant public sphere. Some hybrids are dynamised by the miscegenation that has brought them forth; others merely stand for intermediate, indefinite states of being. I suggest that the swan-man is not a masterfully dual personality so much as he is a figure trapped in mid-transformation – seemingly neither fully here nor quite there” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair”, Itinerant Mythologies, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2009, p. 11).

Like most of the artist’s other protagonists, the ‘swan-man’ in the present lot stands in isolation, occupying a sort of limbo between belonging and alienation. It is this vulnerable state that Nair uses to focus the viewer’s attention on the fluid definition of identity as well as the sociopolitical forces that it is subject to, and often at risk of violence from.

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