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Lot 65

 

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Jitish Kallat's early works, most frequently canvases of epic proportions like the present lot, are scattered with a wide variety of urban references, both textual and pictorial. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, the city in which Kallat grew up and continues to live and work, along with elements of his autobiography, provides the backdrop against which many of these billboard-like works are staged.

In these monumental paintings, the... Jitish Kallat's early works, most frequently canvases of epic proportions like the present lot, are scattered with a wide variety of urban references, both textual and pictorial. The gritty underbelly of Mumbai, the city in which Kallat grew up and continues to live and work, along with elements of his autobiography, provides the backdrop against which many of these billboard-like works are staged.

In these monumental paintings, the artist's "…crowded textures and mobbed narratives testify to an ever-evolving, saturated urban experience". Kallat's body of work "…collectively narrates an unfiltered, roughly-hewn dialectic between individual and universal experiences in Mumbai, where he lives and works…Drawing on elements of autobiography especially in initial exhibitions…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" (Beth Citron, "Jitish Kallat", Chemould Prescott Road website, accessed May 2011).

Ranjit Hoskote locates the present lot against the context of the communal violence that broke out in Gujarat in early 2002, the year Kallat painted it. He notes, "The big city is a theatre of conflict that is unregulated, unpredictable, unrefereed…Urban life is, to Kallat, a preeminently italicised condition. He dramatises this in 'Italics: War-dance' (2002). Four figures come at us, distorted, as though they had stepped out of a TV monitor gone awry. They seem to weave in and out of focus, waxing and waning in resolution: men from the shanties, marginal, and therefore dangerous. The colour bands from which the figures are constructed suggest a camouflage palette; it flickers against a resonant ground colour compounded largely from magenta, crimson and ultramarine. The painting is marked with a crucial motif, the fire-extinguisher, and a flat shape suggestive of a somewhat warped coffin, a cross-reference to the Evaporite, an archetypal figure of death from Kallat's early work. Within this shape, we see a diagrammatic net of vines, budding with hopes and fears: flowers, houses and knives, motifs he uses repeatedly to emblematise the violence of the metropolis. The rubric formed by human organs and echo-images is also a recurrent feature in his recent paintings: the painting begins to function as a contemporary illuminated manuscript" ("Reaching for the Oxygen", Jitish Kallat: First Information Report, Bose Pacia Modern exhibition catalogue, 2002, not paginated).

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