- News (RSS)
- Podcast (RSS)
- Podcast (iTunes)
March 24, 2008
Pushpamala N.: "Paris Autumn"
March 24th to April 19th, 2008
For her second solo exhibition with Nature Morte, Pushpamala N. will present a new body of works entitled "Paris Autumn." The centerpiece of the show is a 35-minute black-and-white film which has been constructed entirely from still photographs. The film will run continuously throughout the day at the gallery and will be accompanied by framed photographs, posters and an installation which elaborate on the film and its imagery. Diverging from the artist's previous work which examined Indian pictorial conventions and models, this body of work is derived from European film noir and comic books, while utilizing presentation techniques of Indian cinema houses. The preliminary form of the exhibition took place at the Galerie Zurcher in Paris in 2006 and the film has been previously screened at the Bellagio Study Centre of the Rockfeller Foundation in Italy, and the Bose Pacia Gallery, Columbia University and New York University, all in New York City.
Notes on the film:
Paris Autumn is a work of fiction in the style of a gothic thriller. The idea for the work came to Pushpamala during a stay in Paris in 2006, where she was invited on a three- month artist residency. While she rented a room in one of the oldest streets in the Marais district, strange happenings began to occur. It was then she realised she was living in the out-houses of the mansion that had once belonged to Gabrielle d'Estrées, King Henri IV's favourite mistress, who died, poisoned no doubt, at the age of twenty-six just as she was about to marry the king.
From that moment on, Pushpamala had to find out about this woman who had come to such a tragic end. Pushpamala's quest began at the Louvre museum, opposite Caravaggio's famous painting The Fortune Teller, and continued to the kitsch atmosphere of the Chapelle des Petits-Augustine, filled with copies of monumental statuary. The action takes place at various points throughout Paris that Pushpamala, stroller and detective graced with the gift of ubiquity, assembles into a strange map: with extenuated perspectives, where the Eiffel Tower and cafés follow images of urban violence. "Pushpamala seems to read the world like a complex and stratified, open and enigmatic literary work that she makes up as she weaves her way through a mysterious urban territory where, right down to the flow of the images, we find the halting nature of the City according to Waler Benjamin, like a succession of paintings put together with brushstrokes." (Bernard Zürcher)
Credits: Producer: Pushpamala N.; Script and Direction: Pushpamala N.; Photography: Cedric Sartore,
Pushpamala N.; Editing and Sound Design: Sankalp Meshram
Cast: Protagonist: Pushpamala N.; Ghost: Gabrielle Soyer; Cedric: Cedric Vincent;
Friends: Bernard and Gwenolee Zurcher; Computer friend: Cedric Sartore
Biography
Pushpamala N. studied sculpture at the MS University in Baroda, India. Since the mid 1990s she has been mainly working in photo performance and video, exhibiting widely all over India and internationally. She uses women's stories and women's material as a device to explore history, memory and contemporary society. She lives and works in Bangalore.
March 15, 2008
GALLERY NATURE MORTE
B-17 Chirag Enclave, New Delhi 110019
Tel: (011) 4174-0215 & 2956-1596
www.naturemorte.com / info@naturemorte.com
Gauri Gill: "The Americans"
Opening on Saturday, March 15th from 6 to 8 pm.
Exhibition continues to March 29th.
Gallery Hours 11 am - 7 pm. Closed Sundays.
Please note: the exhibition will be at a special venue (see address above) and not at the usual gallery space of A1 Neeti Bagh. A full-color catalog will be available.
Gallery Nature Morte is proud to present the exhibition of Gauri Gill's photo-documentary project "The Americans." Shot across the United States from 2000 to 2007, Gill's project documents the Indian diaspora as it has settled across the country in rural areas, small towns and big cities, both retaining its traditional signifiers of Indian identity and merging within a larger American plurality. The resulting color photographs are simultaneously humorous, poignant, ironic, and beguiling. Gill's portrayal of her subjects and their lives emerges through her strict attention to detail and sympathetic juxtapositions.
From the forthcoming catalog essay by critic and curator Gayatri Sinha:
"Nearly five decades after [American photographer] Robert Frank, Gauri Gill takes a series of solitary journeys through America traveling extensively from New York and New Jersey to California to the Midwest and five Southern states. She moves outward, from the nucleus of family and friends to their networks, through a map lined with the material and psychological presence of migrants. The resultant body of photographs. "The Americans," emerges as a palimpsest that pays homage to Frank as much as it documents the new Americans – Indian immigrants. That Gill addresses her subjects with the transnational gaze of the traveling photographer brings her subject within the potent discourse of migration and diaspora, post-coloniality and the new world. Set in the chromatic intimacy of the candid photograph, it is inscribed by the material residue of two cultures, of the glittering flecks of Bollywood and Hollywood, the Indian and the American dream."
The exhibition has already been on view at Bose Pacia Kolkata (February 16 – March 8) and will travel the Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai (April 10-24); Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University (July 8 – August 17); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago (October 4 – December 28); and Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (January 9 – February 14, 2009).
Gauri Gill was born in Chandigarh in 1970. She received her first BFA degree (1992) from Delhi College of Art and her second BFA (1994) from Parsons School of Design in New York. In 2002 she received an MFA in Photography from Stanford University in California. Her works have been exhibited in New Delhi at the Vadhera, Espace and Anant Art Galleries and the India International Centre. Most recently, in 2007 her photographs were included in group exhibitions at the both the Musee Quai Branly in Paris and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Gauri Gill lives and works in New Delhi.
For more information or press photographs, contact Rajeev Dhawan at (011) 2956-1596 or at info@naturemorte.com.
February 23, 2008
GALLERY NATURE MORTE
A1 NEETI BAGH, NEW DELHI 110 049 INDIA
OFFICE: (91) 11- 2956-1596 GALLERY: (91) 11-4174-0215
naturemorte@hotmail.com / www.naturemorte.com
Press Release
New works by Alexis Kersey, Aditya Pande and Dileep Sharma.
February 23 – March 15, 2008
Nature Morte is pleased to present new works by three young artists the gallery has not exhibited before. All share a penchant for imagery culled from popular culture and explore the diversity of possibilities available to painters today.
Alexis Kersey is the senior member of this group, born in 1972 in Mysore. He studied with sign painters in south India to develop a style of painting that could be called Indian Pop. His first exhibition, at the British Council galleries in New Delhi in 2004, combined Indian vernacular languages and images into comical signs. He next developed a style of figurative painting that combined traditional religious iconographies with rock'n'roll subcultures. These works were featured in solo exhibitions mounted by Apparao Galleries in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and London. Kersey's newest works, on display at Nature Morte, combine oil paintings with inlaid wooden panels and mirrors to create densely layered portraits and icons, swirling with both energy and menace.
Aditya Pande, born in Lucknow in 1974 and living in New Delhi, passed out from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 2001. His work mixes computer graphics with painting, drawing and collage, blurring the lines between techniques and imagery. Scribbled animals are rendered in a high-tech computer language and juxtaposed against buoyant forms and colors. Pande is also a partner in Tota Design, which specializes in product and graphic design, and his painterly work owes its freshness to his unorthodox approach and frame of references.
Dileep Sharma was born in Rajasthan in 1974 and graduated from the JJ School of Art in Mumbai in 1998, having studied both painting and print-making. His large scale watercolors feature larger-than-life figures populated by miniatures figures and detailing. The palette is unrealistic while his line-work is precisely representational. Strong, flat colors contrast with the white fields in which the figures float, updating traditional Rajasthani miniature painting. To date, Dileep Sharma has held solo shows of his works in Mumbai, London and Seoul, Korea.
For more information or press reproductions, please contact Geeta Bajaj at (011) 4174-0215. Nature Morte is open Monday through Saturday, from 11am to 7pm and is closed on Sundays.
Continue Reading
