Curatorial Statement: A New Way of Seeing

The inaugural exhibition to launch the Jaipur Centre for Art at the City Palace is a group show of established artists, half from India and half from other parts of the world.

Paintings, sculptures and photography in a variety of styles will be brought together to create an exhibition which acts as a dialogue about how art is made and how we perceive it. What all of the artists have in common is an interest in perception itself as their subject matter. They think about how their works will be viewed by an audience, how they can manipulate or subvert what the viewer will encounter. This is done through a variety of approaches, both materially and conceptually, such as abstraction, multiplication, reflection, and deception. How do we recognize what we are looking at and how do artists manipulate images and materials to cajole, confound, and delight those who experience their artworks? 

The works of Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto may be the best way to elucidate the premise of our exhibition. Sugimoto is primarily a photographer who also works in installation and architectural modes. The four photographs in the exhibition are early works from two of his best-known bodies of work: Theatres and Seascapes. For the Theatres series, started in 1978, Sugimoto found old-fashioned movie palaces in America and set up his large-format camera from the vantage point of the projection booth. Showing a film in an empty theatre, his camera photographs the entire length of the film projected, resulting in a bright white screen surrounded by an opulent interior. For the Seascapes series, begun in 1980, Sugimoto travels the world to take what is in essence the same picture: a square perfectly bisected by sky on the top and sea at the bottom, in varying tones of grey. These images defy what we normally associate with photography: a recording of reality that is truthful. In both the Theatres and the Seascapes, Sugimoto manipulates what he shows to the camera, to record something that is highly artificial, while also questioning how we experience and define time and space.

Our other artist working with photography is Dayanita Singh, who interrogates the medium through a variety of strategies. She treats the photograph and the image it portrays as a cipher that is open to limitless permutations, decks of cards to be shuffled and re-shuffled endlessly. Her work takes the forms of books, posters, sculptures, portable archives, videos, and installations. On view is her work entitled “Time Measures” from 2016, comprising 34 color prints. Each photograph depicts a cloth bundle, all strangely similar yet each one unique, their contents and provenance remaining a mystery.

Each is composed of a natural muslin which has been dyed red and tied with a cord, the red dye fading in different configurations over time.  Singh arranges the images into movements, as if they are parts of a musical score or are predicting weather patterns. “Time Measures” releases us from both linear and cyclical notions of recorded time, positing the subtle shadings of color, the sensuality of folded cloth, and the repetition of patterns as ways to discern the chronologies of our lives. Also included in the exhibition are three black-and-white photographs from 2024 entitled “Archivologies I, II and III.” These are equally mysterious images, bundles of what appear to be papers, yet misshapen into what could be prehistoric organic artifacts, one ponders the wealth of information each cluster might contain. 

Alicja Kwade is a sculptor who uses both man-made and natural materials to investigate our subjective experiences of both time and space. Her works transform objects through their reproduction, repetition, and reflection, leading the viewer to question what they are actually looking at, reality or an illusion? On view is a large sculpture entitled “Transformator” which is composed of a single tree branch, cast in bronze twice with different patinas, spliced together with a bronze mirror ball at their hinge point. The work plays with the idea of the doppelganger, a ghostly double, by the replication of the tree branch and their reflections, as well as those of the viewer and the room, in the mirror ball. Another work, entitled “Siege du Monde” (which translates to “World Headquarters”), appears to be a very common chair perched on top of a large sphere. The chair is cast in bronze and the sphere is carved from a single block of stone, both defying preconceived expectations. As with “Transformator,” a simple object is fused with something uncanny, leading to a perplexing new whole. Kwade says she is interested in the border between science and superstition, or the space where rationality bumps into the mystical. Also included in the exhibition are three works from Kwade’s “Rain” series, made of gold watch hands attached to paper. These “drawings” focus our attention on our consumption of time, how we organize it and give it shape. The disembodied watch hands float as if flecks of gold, defying any logic with which we normally measure the world and our experiences in it.

Sean Scully is a painter and sculptor who started out in the school of Minimalism in the 1970s and by the 1980s broke away from its rigid parameters. Based in New York at the time, the Irish painter was inspired by trips to Morocco and Mexico to bring metaphor and spirituality into his paintings, moving from monochrome greys to vibrant combinations of colors. The work in our exhibition is from the “Wall of Light” series, begun in the 1980s. “Quintana Roo Wall” of 2022 attempts to capture the elusive qualities of patterns of light and shadows on a masonry wall, where the light becomes something tangible and the stone becomes ephemeral. Scully’s paintings could be called a molten calculus, he has coined the terms Emotional Abstraction and the Geometry of Ecstasy for them. Their construction is confounding: are these stripes or blocks, are they moving front to back or back and forth? For Scully, color reflects emotion, memory, and experiences of the natural world. His paintings are densely layered with hidden underpainting effecting the final visuality of what the viewer experiences. Scully has spoken as their compositions being of endless regeneration, part of an infinite field that is constantly being folded and unfolded to reveal new combinations. 

The large-scale works of Tanya Goel are just as much drawings and collages as they are paintings.  Her works are notable for their exploration of a rigorous abstraction that is deeply invested in the process of their creation. The artist creates her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite, and foils, adding to the mix fabrics, plastics, mirrors, and natural elements such as leaves and flowers. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, as these effect how they reflect light. Her compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos. Goel’s paintings can also be read as linguistic systems, as meaning is constructed only through laborious repetition. On view is the recently-completed “Mechanism 21,” from her on-going Mechanism series, begun in 2019. The artist has said of her work: “I want the eye to rest on nothing,” and it is indeed difficult for the viewer to make sense of the cacophony of what they are standing in front of. Also included in the exhibition are watercolors which the artist calls “Botanicals,” alluding to the tradition of botanical illustrations, an art form created for scientific purposes in ancient times and which was particularly popular in India during the British Raj.  Starting with actual flowers, Goel observes how their colors change as they age and decay, maintaining the discipline of careful observation. But rather than realism, Goel interprets these colors in her own geometric structures, fusing tradition with modernity, science with art.

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential and prolific sculptors working today. Perhaps most famous for his public sculptures and site-specific installations that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, Kapoor manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of works, experimenting with an astounding variety of materials. In our exhibition are two examples of his mirror-polished stainless steel concave disc works, which he has been developing since the 1990s. These are not sculptures in the traditional sense that one moves around them, viewing them from 360 degrees. They are objects that seem to float on the wall and reference the history of abstract painting. A mirrored concave disc is something that has been used for a wide variety of scientific purposes since the 18th Century and Kapoor employs them as phenomenological inquiries into the parameters of vision and the paradoxes of representation. The viewer, from a distance, first deciphers the color at the center of the disc and a vague reflection of its surroundings. As one approaches, his own reflection becomes visible, but only in an abstracted form. The shape of the disc magnifies the scale of the reflected image and also inverts it, depending on one’s position to the disc. With both works, “Oriental Blue to Clear” of 2023 and “Magenta to Clear” of 2024, the solid colors at the centers of the discs dissipate out to the edges, which are the pure stainless steel. This further dematerializes their presence, as even the color appears transient and insubstantial. Kapoor has stated: “For me, the illusory is more poetically truthful than the ‘real’.”

In addition to a Fine Art Practice, L.N. Tallur also studied Museology, which has given him a special perspective on the provenance and contexts for art objects. Tallur uses sculpture, wall pieces, interactive work, and site-specific installations to explore multiple layers of meanings in objects and images. He usually starts with traditional Asian sculptures as his reference, bringing contemporary ideas into new manifestations of these forms. In our exhibition we have two new works in bronze from his most recent series: “Glitch Tandava” and “CEO”. Each starts with a common sculpture that can be found in markets throughout India. Tallur subjects each to a barrage of manipulations utilizing the new technologies of Artificial Intelligence and 3-D Printing. The forms of the original sculptures are distorted and abused, appearing to become de-materialized, carrying only hidden traces of their original DNA. These new permutations are then cast in the most traditional of sculptural materials, bronze, contradicting the cutting-edge technologies that have brought them into the world. As with most of Tallur’s artistic practice, irony plays a central role, as if we are destined to always return to the same place we started no matter how much effort we put into going somewhere new. 

Manjunath Kamath creates paintings, drawings and terracotta sculptures that reference historical and classical images using contemporary methods. On view will be a major new painting composed in three panels entitled [title], created for the exhibition. The content of the work comes from a wide variety of sources: frescoes from temples and churches of South Asia, Persian and Indian miniature paintings, patterning from Middle Eastern architecture, motifs from Victorian textiles and Chinese ceramics. He uses only details of each, combining them together into a large grid structure, resembling a labyrinthine mosaic or puzzle. Kamath is fascinated by time and its impact on materials, especially the erasures and distortions it causes to images, and he reproduces these effects through a laboriously layered process. Kamath speaks of his process as echoing how history is manifested, by prioritizing the empty spaces and broken, composite forms, visualizing the chance encounters between different cultures that result in evolution, progress, and communication. Intensely seductive and beguiling, Kamath’s painting ensnares the viewer into a kaleidoscope of references and temptations. Also in our exhibition will be examples of the artist’s recent terracotta wall-mounted sculptures. In each, a truncated torso acts as the support for a cornucopia it holds aloft, an abstracted mixture of organic produce, architectural fragments, and archaeological specimens.