Important Notice

N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. “Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful... N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. “Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School…Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. As the miniature painting format has regularly been used to highlight social and political inequities, Harsha’s reference to them represents an embrace of the tradition updated by his personal idiom to embody contemporary conditions” (Savita Apte and Rebecca Morrill, Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2008, p. 98).

Using the devices of multiplicity and iteration, the artist populates canvases of epic proportions with minutely detailed figures and motifs, each one painstakingly detailed. This juxtaposition of scale and content engages viewers from a distance, drawing them closer and closer till they begin to question the oppositional concepts of diversity and divisiveness, community and individualism, and personal and global politics that the artist grappled with in creating the pieces. In the present lot, Harsha offers a humourous dig on the democratic and inalienable right to gather peacefully. Here, an oversize black skeleton has upset a neat grid of chairs, set out for a meeting, displacing and breaking more than a few in its attempt to settle into the frame. Both ominous and comic, this figure is perhaps representative of the death of democratic principles.

“Harsha’s has always been a vast canvas. He evokes on it the behaviour and mood of life that is observed in a close proximity to multitudes of its manifestations. Be it the instinctual budding, growth and decay of the organic world or the human circumstance steeped in the past as well as shaped by the present with its social and political determinants, the image comes as an endless progression of individual and varied yet essentially bonded entities that pass through basic stages of existence. Like a keen scientist and a kindly judge, the artist with love, gravity and humour records transient – endearing or awkward - specificities that add to a firm but ever altering current of things animated to eventually reveal a deeper structure and values. There is a fine order and a dose of gentle, exuberant unruliness in his compositions, the horizontal flow of figures continuing somewhat in the way of utterly visual words and sentences” (Marta Jakimowicz, Harsha N. S. in Shanghai, Sakshi Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2007, not paginated).

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