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Lot Essay
Jitish Kallat’s interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, video and photography. A graduate of the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, Kallat has established himself as one of the leading contemporary artists practicing in India today. Living and working in the pluralistic mega-city of Mumbai, Kallat draws upon the visual cultures of the city to represent the multiplicity of the daily lives of Mumbaikars. The artist’s vivid figurative works, particularly those from the early 2000s like the present lot, serve as both a celebration of the city as well as a political critique of socioeconomic divides across the nation.
In Monomania (Billboard for Congested Roundabouts), Kallat uses the format of a diptych to examine the lives of anonymous city-dwellers. Here, his palette of grey, deep blue and scorched brown, makes the work appear weather-beaten, like a graffitied wall left exposed to the elements. The figure on the right, reminiscent of an old print advertisement, is visually fragmented, overlaid with distressed surfaces and scars. A distorted dollar sign, doubling as a maze, coils across the upper center of the composition like a motif of entrapment, conjuring a network of economic pursuit and futility. The human forms on the left evoke the chaotic atmosphere of an Indian street with their clashing textures and overlapping limbs. Rendered in a distorted photo-negative manner, they seem to be suggestive not of individual persons but instead of a uniform crowd with a life of its own. At the lower left, a dotted orb evokes a virus or a ticking time bomb, with blood-red threads that emerge from it and connect to the figures in the crowd, suggesting both contagion and fragility.
Many of Kallat’s figures are inspired by found images, like photos in newspapers. They are anonymous, yet familiar. As cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote writes, the artist’s icons are drawn from “the tea-shop, at the traffic intersection: the urchin, the sweeper boy, the beggar… recruited into a pantheon representing the informal economy of the metropolis” (R. Hoskote, The Pictorial Declarative, Reflections on Jitish Kallat’s Recent Works, 2002-2005, Mumbai 2005, p. 42).
Reflecting on his treatment of such subjects, Kallat notes, “The paintings of city dwellers carrying a crumbling cascade of stories on their heads become double portraits: a simultaneous portrait of the city and its inhabitant. The pieces emerge from the belly of strife as experienced in the metropolis but attempt to address the universal and somewhat classic themes of survival and mortality” (Artist statement, N. Miall, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient, Zurich, 2008, p. 52).
In the present lot, the interplay of surface, figure and form becomes a reflection on the realities of life in India’s fast-transforming metropolises. The disorienting accumulation of visual matter is not simply representative of a sensory overload, but rather symbolizes the endurance required to survive urban life and perhaps even thrive in these cities. Within this ‘billboard’, another nod to the city, Kallat pays tribute to the chaotic, crowded but still achingly human life in his home, Mumbai.
In Monomania (Billboard for Congested Roundabouts), Kallat uses the format of a diptych to examine the lives of anonymous city-dwellers. Here, his palette of grey, deep blue and scorched brown, makes the work appear weather-beaten, like a graffitied wall left exposed to the elements. The figure on the right, reminiscent of an old print advertisement, is visually fragmented, overlaid with distressed surfaces and scars. A distorted dollar sign, doubling as a maze, coils across the upper center of the composition like a motif of entrapment, conjuring a network of economic pursuit and futility. The human forms on the left evoke the chaotic atmosphere of an Indian street with their clashing textures and overlapping limbs. Rendered in a distorted photo-negative manner, they seem to be suggestive not of individual persons but instead of a uniform crowd with a life of its own. At the lower left, a dotted orb evokes a virus or a ticking time bomb, with blood-red threads that emerge from it and connect to the figures in the crowd, suggesting both contagion and fragility.
Many of Kallat’s figures are inspired by found images, like photos in newspapers. They are anonymous, yet familiar. As cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote writes, the artist’s icons are drawn from “the tea-shop, at the traffic intersection: the urchin, the sweeper boy, the beggar… recruited into a pantheon representing the informal economy of the metropolis” (R. Hoskote, The Pictorial Declarative, Reflections on Jitish Kallat’s Recent Works, 2002-2005, Mumbai 2005, p. 42).
Reflecting on his treatment of such subjects, Kallat notes, “The paintings of city dwellers carrying a crumbling cascade of stories on their heads become double portraits: a simultaneous portrait of the city and its inhabitant. The pieces emerge from the belly of strife as experienced in the metropolis but attempt to address the universal and somewhat classic themes of survival and mortality” (Artist statement, N. Miall, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient, Zurich, 2008, p. 52).
In the present lot, the interplay of surface, figure and form becomes a reflection on the realities of life in India’s fast-transforming metropolises. The disorienting accumulation of visual matter is not simply representative of a sensory overload, but rather symbolizes the endurance required to survive urban life and perhaps even thrive in these cities. Within this ‘billboard’, another nod to the city, Kallat pays tribute to the chaotic, crowded but still achingly human life in his home, Mumbai.