Important Notice

Nalini Malani’s fantastical works present a flat surface that bears the imprint of traditionally feminine artforms like kantha embroidery. She stitches together images to create a scroll-like effect that has the narrative logic of a dream. The present lot is from her Nursery Tales series which assembles imagery excavating the gruesome undertones that linger in sanitised modern fairytales. “The details in Malani’s paintings are not... Nalini Malani’s fantastical works present a flat surface that bears the imprint of traditionally feminine artforms like kantha embroidery. She stitches together images to create a scroll-like effect that has the narrative logic of a dream. The present lot is from her Nursery Tales series which assembles imagery excavating the gruesome undertones that linger in sanitised modern fairytales. “The details in Malani’s paintings are not elements that add up to a tidy whole. Each detail is a story in itself, like a glyph you could recognise but are not equipped to read and understand… she feeds off the quirkiness and violence integral to purportedly innocent nursery rhymes and fairy tales… Malani was intrigued by the horror and cruelty woven into children’s tales, visible and audible even through the sanitizations of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault.” (“Three Artists in Pursuit of a Once and Future World”, Nancy Adajania, Excavation: Memory / Myth / Membrane, Mumbai: Art Musings, 2008)

Malani often draws upon myth and folklore to subvert them. In Nursery Tales, she uses digestible narratives like fairy tales to create a carnival of offbeat and puzzling impressions. “In this Never-Neverland where everything is off-balance, we are sucked into another whorl of happenings: that of scientific illustrations of fruits and plants awakened from their slumber by a wriggling worm or the greedy proboscis of a bee. A new alphabet is taught to the inhabitants of this universe: that of mortality and decadence borrowed from the visuality of Dutch still life.” (Adajania, 2008)

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