Important Notice

As influenced by kitsch imagery and bazaar aesthetics as she is by Indian mythology and traditional art practices like Tanjore painting, Anjolie Ela Menon’s works liberally blend ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the sacred and the secular, the discarded and the collected, to challenge customary hierarchical notions of artistic creation.

“Like a wanton fabulist, Menon brings accretion, division, conjunction to play upon the conventional... As influenced by kitsch imagery and bazaar aesthetics as she is by Indian mythology and traditional art practices like Tanjore painting, Anjolie Ela Menon’s works liberally blend ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the sacred and the secular, the discarded and the collected, to challenge customary hierarchical notions of artistic creation.

“Like a wanton fabulist, Menon brings accretion, division, conjunction to play upon the conventional image…A play of paradox is inherent in the manipulation of images. There is also a sense of the passage of time in the positioning of her own apparently ‘timeless’ icons, and the perennial quality of the kitsch image, of the implicit dialogue between herself and the anonymous painter of the popular ‘holy picture’. That the historical moment belongs to kitsch in contemporary India is affirmed by the free flow of images that receive affirmation and even sanctity when translated into another medium, such as cinema or new age temple architecture” (Gayatri Sinha, Gods and Others, Apparao Galleries exhibition catalogue, 2000, p. 4, 6).

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