Important Notice

Nataraj Sharma plays with narrative and allegory in this 2004 painting composed of human figures set up on a stage scaffolding only to converge into each other. The hierarchy referred to in the title is echoed by the landings on which the male and female figures are placed, as well as in the circular images above them, which zoom in sequentially from a view of the universe to a map of India and ultimately to the fine art campus of the M S... Nataraj Sharma plays with narrative and allegory in this 2004 painting composed of human figures set up on a stage scaffolding only to converge into each other. The hierarchy referred to in the title is echoed by the landings on which the male and female figures are placed, as well as in the circular images above them, which zoom in sequentially from a view of the universe to a map of India and ultimately to the fine art campus of the M S University of Baroda. Sharma's large scale canvases from this period offered an unabashed commentary on societal norms. The imagery in Hierarchical Arselickers is "now extrapolated into extravaganzas of detailing couched in heaping portions of wit. Nataraj flirts with both sarcasm and sentimentality, his approach both mercurial and committed, as if to say that this is the way life is so why should painting be any different." (Peter Nagy, "To Bridle the Tremours," Nataraj Sharma, New York: Bose Pacia, 2005, accessed on Critical Collective, online)

The present lot was exhibited at the Bose Pacia gallery in New York the year after it was painted. "The Baroda-based artist's ten paintings and four works on paper display a developed and expansive visual language - all the better for his intelligent critique of human intrusion in the natural world, and, more broadly, of the disjointed perceptual quantification that characterizes our way of understanding the visible... The carefully structured sequence of figures in Hierarchical Arselickers, 2004, span a canvas only to fold back on each other in an abutting one." (Nicole Rudick, Artforum, 2005, online) The diptych provides the perfect structure for a self-referential composition which circles back on Sharma as an artist who "appears to stand a little off-centre, in the half-shade, half-light locus of the observer/participant." (Gayatri Sinha, "Timeline," Stretch 2006, New Delhi: Bodhi Art, 2007, p. 126)

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