Well, it’s the final instalment, though I may break it into 2 or 3 posts to allow adding more pictures. I’m on the plane heading home, just as the Delhi climate starts to become pleasant. I’ve got a trip to Birmingham on Tuesday, to visit the resin casting factory for the lens sculpture, and a meeting on Thursday about another commission, so if I don’t write the week up now, then it might not happen.
The big event of the week was our Open Studio on Wednesday, but I’m going to save that till last. Whilst Abishek and Joanna were struggling with digital projectors, computers and DVD rigs on Tuesday night, I was able to swan off to another two openings. The Sanskriti Foundation was first, on the road out towards Gurgaon. It’s an area where you find what they call ‘farmhouses’, actually 8 bedroom modernist palaces set in vast manicured grounds surrounded by high walls and razor wire, more proof (as if it were needed) of the anti-urban mentality of Delhi’s uber-class. The Sanskriti Foundation, however, is open to the public, and houses museums of everyday craft objects and terracotta. They also offer studios and facilities for residencies, though funding is the responsibility of the artists.
Shaun Cassidy and Kristy Verenga were the two artists showing work. Both had been rather surprised to find that they were the only two artists in residence during August, but had luckily enjoyed each others company, and produced some collaborative work. Shaun is Professor of Sculpture at Winthrop University and has done quite a lot of technically demanding large public art projects, whereas Kristy is a painter with a rainbow palette and an interest in myth and symbol. Hard to imagine the overlap, but the collaborative work was recognisably a product in equal measure of both their ideas and sensibilities. They’d cut giant circles out of the most gorgeously coloured fabrics, and photographed these laying on the ground in various locations around the city. I joked that the circles of colour looked like refugees from Hirst’s spot paintings. The wonderful and surprising juxtapositions in these large digital prints had a conceptual and formal clarity that was very distinctive, adding an interior, emotional dimension to fragments of Delhi space and time. I was rather jealous of the way that they had found to engage with the city.
The other opening on Tuesday was at the Vadehra gallery, a massive, classy, white space in the industrial suburb of Okhla. Sumedh Rajendran was showing large figures constructed in a flat boxy style from the printed steel sheet used in product packaging. Dramatic poses hinted at the compressed narratives of newspaper crime reports, and the hinges and locks on the figures suggested the limited options in those blighted lives. Strong work, and I gather he’s already gone international. Top snacks and a slightly friendlier crowd than other galleries (more artists?) made for a very pleasant evening.
A large piece of Sumedh’s was on prominent display in the private collection we visited on Friday. Anupam Poddar seems to be the proto-Saatchi of the Indian scene, with a lot of large, high impact pieces, such as Sudarshan Shetty’s car-humping Tyranosaurus. We only saw the work in Poddar’s house, but this included Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Raqs Media Collective, Jagganath Panda, Anita Dube, Sushant Mondal, Ranbir Kaleka, A. Bala Subramanyam and Bhupen Khacker. Poddar is buying non-stop, and there is a lot of work in storage, but from next year he and his team of curators will be organising exhibitions at his newly built Delhi Foundation.
