Booth #626 at Artexpo
Today’s Artwork of the Day is “Untitled II” by Pratul Dash. Pratul is published by Tamarind Art Gallery, which will be exhibiting at Booth # 626 at Artexpo New York 2010. Tamarind Art Gallery is a major advocate of contemporary Indian art, seeking to showcase high-caliber Indian works to western and global audiences.
Indian artist Pratul Dash uses a wide range of media to explore the social and ecological concerns of modern India. Born and raised in rural Orissa, he moved to New Delhi to study painting at the College of Art, graduating in 1998. The transition from his simple life to the complex urban environment of New Delhi made a strong impression on Pratul. His paintings and videos are an examination of the destruction wrought by urbanization and globalization on both the natural landscape and the human psyche.
Pratul says:
My works do not narrate any particular tale or have any obvious coherent narrative quality, yet they are the product of an endless quest to locate the urban and the existence of the human beings in the urban locale. I attempt to incorporate the irony of the developmental myth with the sublimity of human life.
With the rise of neo-capitalism, the strangeness and sameness of new urban culture is developing all over the country. This rapidly changing social landscape provides the backdrop to my paintings, in which I place myself as the receiver—either as a child who is a helpless observer of vast social construction (in terms of urban development and vertical growth), or/and an individual who probably realizes that within developmental work there is a sense of waste, decay and de-humanization.
The large color fields of my paintings provide a spatial limitlessness; indicate a unity of time and place; and embrace the conscious experience which travels from personal to psychological to social with a scent of the human tragedy in the hope to progress.
Dear Pratul, I just bought one of your paintings (untitled, with your signature "... attempt to incorporate the irony of the developmental myth with the sublimity of human life") from Indigo Blue Art Gallery in Singapore. The painting shows a man in a meditating posture on a lotus, against a backdrop of industrialisation etc.
ReplyDeleteYou know what? I particularly liked the visual imagery that your painting evoked. To me, ity was less ironical ands more hopeful. I see it as sublimity (evoked by the meditating/ yogic posture of the man on the Lotus - with all the cultural and spiritual connotations of a lotus) DESPITE the industrialisation/ development mess. Hence, the hope. Also, the lotus' well known association with muddy waters and the water pollution as a result of inmdustrialisation/ development is particularly evocative & poignant.
Would love to catch up with you when you are next in Singapore. My mail id is
Hey very cool web site!! Man.. Beautiful.. Amazing..
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