Important Notice

The city of Mumbai and its wide variety of inhabitants feature prominently in Jitish Kallat’s body of work. Inspired by the contradictions inherent to the megalopolis, the artist uses his canvases, photographs, sculptures and installations to jolt viewers out of their complacent urbanity and open their eyes to the other side of their city. As Ranjit Hoskote notes, Kallat is “…among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized... The city of Mumbai and its wide variety of inhabitants feature prominently in Jitish Kallat’s body of work. Inspired by the contradictions inherent to the megalopolis, the artist uses his canvases, photographs, sculptures and installations to jolt viewers out of their complacent urbanity and open their eyes to the other side of their city. As Ranjit Hoskote notes, Kallat is “…among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community…And he records these phenomena, not as impersonal social-scientific memoranda, but through the tender, terrifying immediacy of the painted surface” (Alchemy, Art Musings exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated).

The present lot is the last in a series of twelve paintings titled Herbarium (Annual-Perennial), where each canvas has “…one large bloom centrally illustrated… [and is] composed of the hallucinogenic faces of human beings, their features coalescing into one another, as if the victims of a monstrous industrial accident or the results of an overzealous amusement park ride that has careened into a crowd of onlookers after snapping free of its cables. The ‘flowers’, so to speak, are cradled in a network of capillary tubes or perhaps lymph nodes, further accentuating the sensation of observing the physiological causes for either multiple personality disorder or the disjointed language of a fever patient. As if to add insult to injury, Mr. Kallat then mutilates the surfaces of his works, making them seem old before their time or genetically diseased, spoiling their hygienic demeanors with patinas of putrescence. Painting, for this artist, seems to be part diagnostic practice, part sociological interrogation, part confessional purge, and part cannibalistic impropriety” (Peter Nagy, “When Flesh Creeps, the Mind Boggles”, Panic Acid, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2005, p. 9, 10).

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