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Lot 47

 

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Born and raised in Bombay, Jitish Kallat's early works represent a chronicle of "...his journey through a choking inferno: the frayed, ugly edges and manic pace" of his home city ("Reaching For Oxygen", Jitish Kallat: First Information Report, Bose Pacia Modern Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, not paginated). Deploying a visual iconography derived from his immediate urban surroundings, Kallat's works address the lacuna between the way things... Born and raised in Bombay, Jitish Kallat's early works represent a chronicle of "...his journey through a choking inferno: the frayed, ugly edges and manic pace" of his home city ("Reaching For Oxygen", Jitish Kallat: First Information Report, Bose Pacia Modern Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, not paginated). Deploying a visual iconography derived from his immediate urban surroundings, Kallat's works address the lacuna between the way things are and the way things ought to be in the post-colonial metropolis.

Not afraid to use in-your-face motifs, Kallat utilizes the large-scale format to amplify images of oppression, scarcity, and violence, to probe the sort of subject-matter that rarely makes newspaper headlines and that is left unconsidered by those too afraid to face the asymmetries and realities of life in urban India. His early work prominently features the subaltern as an almost homogenous mass, like the street urchins in the present lot, conferring upon it an unforeseen agency that forces the viewer to take notice and confront the subject-matter. By referencing photocopying and technologies that permit incremental upscaling of low-resolution images, Kallat creates distorted figures that rest on the threshold of abstraction. The distortion, along with the large-scale format, makes the image and hence, the critique it offers unavoidable, almost daunting.

"One of Kallat's key protagonists is the survivor, the mutant, the victim: the secular martyr-hero of an urban iconography. In the piquantly titled 'Untitled (Fish)' (2002), he orchestrates the anonymity of a group of urchins against the keen significance of a symbol. We infer, rather than see, a dull-toned group of urchins; set on the ridged surface, once again suggestive of the scan-lined monitor screen, the urchins form a backdrop to the template of fish made up of red 'no-entry' symbols. The title teases us: a school of fish; a group of street children who have never seen the inside of a school" (Ibid.).

Kallat sets up the subject at odds with the presentation, rendering scenes of deprivation with a tinge of optimism. In the present lot, for example, he "...hints that his images are intended to celebrate the child as divinity symbolising the future" ("The Pictorial Declarative", Jitish Kallat, Walsh Gallery and Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2004, p. 40). He also infuses his forms with "...an internal fuzz - of what could be visually deemed to represent an unrequited ambition, a buzz of energy, of life itself, formed and yet formless, quizzically looking back from the overcast world of the unidentified" (Shaheen Mehrali, "Delineating the Vernacular", Jitish Kallat - Public Notice 3, Art Institute of Chicago, 2011, p. 35).

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