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Lot 96

 

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“The city street is my university. One finds all the themes of life and art-pain, happiness, anger, violence and compassion-played out here in full volume.” - JITISH KALLAT

Jitish Kallat draws his subjects from a variety of sources – ranging from the streets to relevant texts or news stories – to comment on contemporary socio-political concerns. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, which the artist calls home, along with self-portraits... “The city street is my university. One finds all the themes of life and art-pain, happiness, anger, violence and compassion-played out here in full volume.” - JITISH KALLAT

Jitish Kallat draws his subjects from a variety of sources – ranging from the streets to relevant texts or news stories – to comment on contemporary socio-political concerns. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, which the artist calls home, along with self-portraits and autobiographical elements, provide the backdrop for many of these billboard-style works. Usually comprising several elements and metaphors, his works often need to be decoded and their narratives alter based on the viewers’ perceptions.

According to Beth Citron, “Jitish Kallat’s crowded textures and mobbed narratives testify to an ever- evolving, saturated urban experience... collectively narrat[ing] an unfiltered, roughly hewn dialectic between individual and universal experiences in Mumbai... 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.” (Jitish Kallat, Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road, 2009, online)

Art critic and historian Deepak Ananth has drawn parallels between Kallat’s art and the pictorial language that evolved in art in the 1950s and ‘60s – that of the ‘flatbed picture plane’, theorised by Leo Steinberg. The flatbed plane encompassed a shift in orientation from the vertical to the horizontal plane and served as a receptacle of objects and data, either in a cohesive form or in chaos. Ananth argues that while the underrepresented form the subject matter in Kallat’s art, similar to that of his Indian predecessors, he takes this a step forward with a style that is “...street-wise, slangy, hectic and rapid, impatient to register the myriad contradictory signals that come within the precincts of its scan.” (Deepak Ananth and Jitish Kallat, “Delirious Entropy,” Jitish Kallat: 365 Lives, Seoul: Arario Gallery, 2007, p. 8) This chaos, which is so typical of urban Indian life, seems to be transcribed into the present lot.

In its theme, this lot echoes a prior set of works executed in 2007. Kallat frequently turns to the city-dweller, either as part of a crowd or in isolation, to comment on their resilience to the harshness of Mumbai. He spoke of the origin of those works in an interview with Beijing based critic and curator Huang Du – they were photographs he had taken of young children selling books at traffic lights in the city, which gave rise to “...a thousand colliding stories; a complex narrative of 18 million people living on a tiny island of 468 square kilometres.” (Artist quoted in Ananth and Kallat, p. 26)

Each of the boys in the present lot express unbridled joy, contrary to the commotion of the streets of the city that “sits atop their heads. In this respect the paintings are double portraits, depictions of street urchins but also portraits of the claustrophobic and chaotic city, its countless narratives tumbling Medusa-like from each child’s head.” (“Jitish Kallat,” www.haunchofvenison.com, online) Kallat’s love for elevating the subaltern additionally comes through the bold palette and the use of a sunburst pattern in the background – a device that echoes the glorification of figures seen in propaganda posters of the 20th century.

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