Important Notice

Jagannath Panda’s art reflects his concerns about urbanization and environmental degradation and the effects they have on natural life patterns. Here, against the background of a construction site, a common goat confronts the viewer with a questioning glare. Like most of Panda’s work, the present lot highlights the complex relationship between the natural and the manmade, the traditional and the modern. Precariously perched on a pile of bricks... Jagannath Panda’s art reflects his concerns about urbanization and environmental degradation and the effects they have on natural life patterns. Here, against the background of a construction site, a common goat confronts the viewer with a questioning glare. Like most of Panda’s work, the present lot highlights the complex relationship between the natural and the manmade, the traditional and the modern. Precariously perched on a pile of bricks in the foreground, the defiant goat contemplates the viewer and its own situation, seemingly trapped in the frame by a fence of mangled iron rods. Behind the animal, the clothes of a labourer hang to dry on a bamboo, and in the distance the arid land is punctuated by the beginnings of human development.

In depicting the animal in a moment of vulnerability, Panda raises questions about our common and imperiled future. “Jagannath Panda not only empathises with the birds, fishes, monkeys and ruminating creatures lost in the haphazard and perilous structures that generate giddy, disturbing perspectives, but extends the metaphor of their fate to bear on our own in an environment that we share along with its social contrasts, injustices and irreconcilable ingredients of the disarray…Disappointment and apprehension make him wholeheartedly turn to his animals in praise of their grace and ability to survive instinctively and with joy. He does admit that they cannot carry on untouched by civilisation, have to adjust and transfigure. Still…he lets them preserve a pristine simplicity of living to live” (Marta Jakimowicz, The Human Animal, Gallery Threshold and Religare Art Initiative exhibition catalogue, 2009, not paginated).

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