Important Notice

The main thrust of Nataraj Sharma's body of work has always been a "…dialogue with the fraught relationship between urbanization, the landscape, and human presences at the interstices of modernity" (Chaitanya Sambrani, "On the Double Edge of Desire", Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, Asia Society, New York, 2005, p. 29).

In developing and extending this dialogue, Sharma's diverse oeuvre has repeatedly turned to the landscape,... The main thrust of Nataraj Sharma's body of work has always been a "…dialogue with the fraught relationship between urbanization, the landscape, and human presences at the interstices of modernity" (Chaitanya Sambrani, "On the Double Edge of Desire", Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, Asia Society, New York, 2005, p. 29).

In developing and extending this dialogue, Sharma's diverse oeuvre has repeatedly turned to the landscape, whether viewed from a comfortable distance or in an uneasy close-up, whether densely populated or pristinely uninhabited. In the present lot, a large-format triptych, Sharma "…presents the outskirts of the urban space littered with the detritus of human production…degradation is rendered in a neo-Pointillist style in Wasteland (Gurgaon), seemingly built from feces and scrap itself" (Peter Nagy, "To Bridle the Tremours - Nataraj Sharma's painterly path", Nataraj Sharma, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated).

Constructed with painstaking precision and finesse, this birds-eye view of the satellite city of Gurgaon, once farmland and now a highly developed industrial and financial center of steel and glass, represents Sharma's ongoing "…rumination over man, machine and the humanscape." According to Yashodhara Dalimia and Salima Hashmi, "In Nataraj Sharma's landscape, the very miasma of existence confronts apocalyptic realities…his large landscapes of idyllic beauty, where man or animal is posed against an incredibly poignant sunset, or expanding skies filled with atomic waste, posit the waste of man-made disasters against the limitlessness of possibilities that seek global equations. In infesting the landscape with the detritus of industrial waste, Sharma matches his orange-streaked horizon with a speckled grey somnolence, which critiques an alternate vision" ("Endless Terrain", Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: The Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007, p. 203, 204).

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