NATURE MORTE PRESENTS “ HANGING GARDENS”
July 29–August 28, 2021
While technology continues its unabated command over more and more of our lives, in the past decade the art world has seemingly countered this trend by championing handmade art practices which had previously been labelled with the pejorative nomenclature of craft.
Artisanal has been the moniker applied to this inclination in the fields of fashion, cuisine, product design, and home décor. While ceramics have been exploited and celebrated as the preeminent material for sculpture, textiles have been similarly lauded as an appropriate avenue of aesthetic inquiry. It is as if both the mind and the eyes crave experiences that cannot be found online, through the smartphone or laptop. The qualities of tactility, spontaneity, hybridity, and immediacy have become increasingly sought after by both artists themselves and art aficionados. This exhibition brings together explorations into the overlapping of fine art practices and textiles.
Sagarika Sundaram develops new languages in the medium of woven dhurries. Her imagery relates to both historical painting and computer codes, exploiting the flat weave to visualize the space between a perception of depth and the flow of information. The dhurries also explore a sense of nostalgia, which is palpable through works such as Nokia, Symbols, and Star. Sundaram received an MFA in Textiles from the Parsons School of Design, NY, and a degree from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She also studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She currently lives and works between New York and Bangalore.
Sayan Chanda explores organic weaving to create wall reliefs that speak of abstract painting, linear repetitions, and a sleight of hand that tricks the eye. Many of his works use handwoven, or found textiles, some of which allude to personally charged objects such as the Kantha quilts from Bengal, where Sayan grew up. He is a recent graduate from the University of the Arts London, UK, and received a B.DES Textile Design from the National Institute of Design, India in 2013. He currently lives and works in London, UK.
Manchaha is a program developed by the Jaipur Rugs Foundation to empower individual weavers to experiment with imagery and authorship. Each hand-knotted carpet is one-of-a-kind and has been made using hand-spun leftover yarn. Some use traditional carpet motifs in surprising combinations, while others forego recognizable patterns for the sake of abstraction. The Manchaha works are both highly sophisticated and refreshingly askew; they elaborate on freedom for the sake of expression and provide welcome alternatives to trodden paths.
A–7 Poorvi Marg, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi 110057. Monday–Saturday 10 AM–6 PM. Closed on Sundays.
Find more about the Exhibition and Artists:
