Dhruvi Acharya
New works
October 5 - November 1, 2008
New Delhi
"ONE LIFE ON EARTH": New works by Dhruvi Acharya
Opening on October 5th and continuing to November 1st, 2008.
After her critically acclaimed show in 2006, Chemould Prescott Road and Nature Morte are very pleased to present Dhruvi Acharya's new body of work entitled "One Life on Earth." The exhibition was on view at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai during August and will be on view at Nature Morte in New Delhi in October.
Dhruvi Acharya's whimsical, highly detailed and layered painting continues. In these days, when the use of "artistic assistants" seems the order of the day, Dhruvi labours tirelessly on her canvasses. The result is a breathtaking "breathless" landscape of the people who inhabit Dhruvi's world. On immediate viewing, the surface of her work seems flat and opaque. Go closer and an intricately woven world opens up completely new psychological and visual dimensions in her work. The scale of her work has also shifted: not compromising on the infinitesimal detailing, the sizes of the works have increased significantly.
In this series, she reflects on the current world environment, violence and discord. Acharya creates a unique world where her protagonists metamorphose by the logic of that world; they change shape, they expand, they distend, they float, sprout plants, grow claws, and use "breath-packs" to survive.
In "Air Fair," a 14-foot, 22-panel painting, Acharya has composed multiple individual works into a large single tableau. A mock-advertisement "selling" oxygen, wind, fresh-air, this large multi-paneled painting brings together latent interests that Acharya has had, such as typography, design, the use of language, contemporary street art, comic books, and advertising. With the combination of text and painting, this is an ambitious deviation from what the artist has done in the past.
In another large format work, (16-feet in four panels) titled "Airfare," the war for air is between the "haves" and the "have-nots"; in this case the haves being the mutated protagonists growing their own plants atop their heads, whereas the have-nots being human beings, carrying flower-breath-packs (as oxygen bags), clawed and armed to fight for air from the "poor" have. A futuristic comic- book view into times to come, clad with her wry humour, delicately painted, is another step ahead for Acharya.
A series of 3 paintings titled "Words," have a strong continuity with earlier works. While the earlier paintings had the figure most often represented by an empty speech bubble, in these works the artist has inverted the idea, wherein the words in the speech bubbles are clearly in place and the people missing. The story complete within the span of the canvas, it provokes the viewer into figuring out the tale by simply reading the text. Actual folk tales that represent the suppression of women is the subject matter of this body work.
DHRUVI ACHARYA, born (1971) and brought up in Mumbai, began painting her memories of home soon after reaching the USA in 1995. She received her MFA in painting, with a scholarship, from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore in 1998 and did her undergraduate study at the Sophia Polytechnic College in Mumbai. She has been exhibiting professionally since her graduation in 1998, when the Gomez Gallery asked to exhibit her thesis show work.
In 2006 Dhruvi was awarded the Aditya Birla Kala Kiran Puraskar (India) and nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (USA). In 2005 she was featured on the cover of India Today, as one of the fifty under 35 year old "leaders of their generation". Dhruvi's work has been written about in Art India, Flash Art, The Hindustan Times, The Times of India, Vogue India, Time Out Mumbai, India Today, The Hindu, Indian Express, Mid Day, Asian Age, Elle, L'officielle, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, among others.
Dhruvi's paintings have been exhibited at The Queens Museum of Art and Bose Pacia Gallery (New York) and Spazio Oberdan (Milan). A mother of two (five and seven-year old) boys, Dhruvi lived and worked in New York until 2004, and now divides her time between Mumbai and New York.
Nature Morte is open Monday through Saturday, from 11am to 7pm and closed on Sundays. For more information, contact Geeta Bajaj at (011) 4174-0215.