Important Notice

Born in Kolkata in 1965, Anandajit Ray’s body of work playfully draws on India’s miniature tradition, Pop art, comic strips, and the work of Surrealists to offer viewers a release from reality and its burdens. In the words of fellow artist Jitish Kallat, "Ray’s is a strange serio-comic world where acts of violence, terrorism and death seem as banal and edible as the organized wrestling bouts on television; acts of love seem made-for-celluloid... Born in Kolkata in 1965, Anandajit Ray’s body of work playfully draws on India’s miniature tradition, Pop art, comic strips, and the work of Surrealists to offer viewers a release from reality and its burdens. In the words of fellow artist Jitish Kallat, "Ray’s is a strange serio-comic world where acts of violence, terrorism and death seem as banal and edible as the organized wrestling bouts on television; acts of love seem made-for-celluloid rather than real…Although Ray’s indebtedness to surrealism and to the patient elegance of the Indian miniatures must be mentioned, it is actually the melding of the two with the possibilities of Pop art that gives Ray’s art that naughty adolescence…Through a richly imaginative collage-aesthetic, Ray carefully constructs a paranormal world caught in suspended animation" ("A Concentrated Brew", Art India, Vol. 3 Issue 3, p.80).

In his more recent sculptures, Anandajit Ray transcends the physical confines of his miniature-like works on paper, turning instead to a collection of three-dimensional objects. Although the focus of these sculptural works is still on figuration, particularly of the human form, their imagery is not as complex and demanding. In the present lot, comprised of four pairs of aluminum hands set in padded display boxes, Ray playfully questions the concepts of ownership and transience through his unique visual idiom. The steel ball bearings affixed to the hands represent droplets of water which, rather than flowing away, have defied gravity to adhere to the form in a surreal manner familiar to his oeuvre.

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