Important Notice

Jitish Kallat's early works are scattered with a wide variety of self and urban references, both textual and pictorial. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, the city in which Kallat grew up and continues to live and work, along with his own image and elements of his autobiography, provides the backdrop against which many of these billboard-like works are staged. Graduating from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1996, the artist "…started out as a... Jitish Kallat's early works are scattered with a wide variety of self and urban references, both textual and pictorial. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, the city in which Kallat grew up and continues to live and work, along with his own image and elements of his autobiography, provides the backdrop against which many of these billboard-like works are staged. Graduating from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1996, the artist "…started out as a painter of himself and, occasionally, of family members, enlisting the aid of the camera, scanner, photocopier and computer as distancing devices in his unsentimental exploration of identity, culture and ancestry" (Girish Shahane, "On the Road", Jitish Kallat: Unclaimed Baggage, Albion Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 20, 21).

The artist's body of work "…collectively narrates an unfiltered, roughly-hewn dialectic between individual and universal experiences in Mumbai, where he lives and works…Drawing on elements of autobiography especially in initial exhibitions like "Apostrophe" in New Delhi, 1998, Kallat transformed self-portraiture and distorted pre-existing, recognizable photocopy and newsprint images into large-scale paintings in step with commercial media and the fast, abrasive physicality of changing Mumbai" (Beth Citron, "Jitish Kallat", Chemould Prescott Road website, accessed May 2012).

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