Important Notice

Jagannath Panda’s body of work draws heavily from his personal experiences of traditional rural life, migration and rapid urbanization. Born into a family of priests in a small Orissa village, the artist moved to the cities of Vadodara, Fukuoka and London to study painting. Following his education, Panda settled in New Delhi, India’s political capital and one of its most rapidly expanding cities.

It is no wonder then that Panda’s art... Jagannath Panda’s body of work draws heavily from his personal experiences of traditional rural life, migration and rapid urbanization. Born into a family of priests in a small Orissa village, the artist moved to the cities of Vadodara, Fukuoka and London to study painting. Following his education, Panda settled in New Delhi, India’s political capital and one of its most rapidly expanding cities.

It is no wonder then that Panda’s art speaks of the dichotomies and contradictions of day-to-day life in the cities of developing nations, and the divides between rural and urban, nature and settlement and traditional and contemporary that they illuminate. As Deeksha Nath explains, “Panda’s encounters have allowed him to develop a layered aesthetic which combines visual considerations (such as notions of beauty and visual pleasure) and social-psychological commentaries. Panda’s motifs often allude to the underlying forces that drive the social mechanism…once decoded [his works] unravel the dichotomies the artist continues to grapple with, between the dictates contained within his dogmatic religious upbringing and his developed and learned critical conscience. An assortment of images addresses sophisticated themes of frustrated desires, unanswered questions, socio-economic injustices and inequalities” (Private/Corporate IV: Works from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar, New Delhi, and DaimlerChrysler Collections: A Dialogue exhibition catalogue, DaimlerChrysler AG, Berlin, 2007, p. 49).

Among the recurring subjects of Panda's large format works on canvas is the peacock, India's national bird and a traditional symbol of prosperity. The artist, however, uses the majestic bird not as an emblem of wealth and success, but as one of the uneasy sense of dislocation that his urban landscapes communicate. In the present lot, a lone peacock surveys a construction site, possibly occupying what was once its natural habitat. Panda’s seamless juxtaposition of the bird’s long, regal neck and crown of feathers with the raw brick and tangled metal wires that represent urban sprawl in metropolises like Delhi is unsettling at best. At worst, it describes a dismal future in which our aggressive colonization of space has pushed every other species to the brink of extinction, which, in turn, threatens human survival.

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