Attuned in evolving
Even though one trusts the talent of Sakshi Gupta, her exhibitions do not fail to surprise with their amazingly novel qualities, in particular that focused on complex insights and concepts.
It lets those be intuited, felt and recognised in the sheer sensation of the tactile visual presence of her works. In fact, desiring her sculptures to be sensed rather than verbally explained, the artist resists titling the individual pieces and extensively commenting on the whole.
Remembering Gupta's earlier emphasis on the unnatural, yet overwhelmingly breathing matter of our world where organic substances become increasingly substituted by and blended with the metallic of the man-made. "Become the Wind", her third solo at Galleryske (January 24 to March 13), strikes thanks to its calmer and subtler character that allows the viewer to grasp contradictory conditions, moods and aspirations as reconciled, instead of uncomfortable and reaching one's mind's eye through its intangible poetic content inherent in the physicality of the images.
More than the contrariness of the current changes in reality and in the individual, the concern remains with the processes of this transformation during which stability anchored in familiar environs or past forms have to negotiate the new present in a continuous state of evolution, admitting the openness of one's desires and of the future.
In consequence, an aesthetically different feature here belongs to the much more whole and animated being-like appearance of the metal scrap substances of the sculptures whose origin sometimes can hardly be guessed. Eventually, the impact is of a loftier, lyrical striving, attuning to oneself as well as to the surroundings, especially those of landscape and of home while discovering parallels between someone's leaving behind the skin of previous notions, ideals or feelings during personal development and nature's altering and shedding its old shapes to grow new or just more plentiful ones.
The metaphor being incorporated in the used and abandoned scrap material itself, when handled, now becomes subdued for the sake of nuanced and broader expressiveness to the extent that sometimes the multitudes of hard iron almost loose their rudimentary properties emphasising in-between or simultaneously opposite conditions.
The dense iron rods that build the body of a smallish entity on the floor at the entrance seem to be nearly molten particles of a crust that may belong to some fleshy, dried leaf or a shell pregnant with seeds but may also be already becoming some sort of animal about to stir, as the spectator easily identifies with the circumstances on the wished for verge.
The immense sculpture inside the gallery evokes the grandeur of the life cycle as it captures a virtual forest of scaly creepers yielding, literally shedding their substance to the meatier mound of an elephant mother who in turn offers herself in child-birth. If fragility and pain can be guessed under the overwhelming, empowering transformation of the she animal, another sculpture of a baby elephant empathises with its under-confidence and the efforts of relieving self-reassurance, the trunk wrapped tightly several times round its smooth-exposed body.
The second enormous, towering piece with fan blades slowly moving round between the filigree foliaged branches of a columnar tree invites one's attention to the flora perceived and felt yet through the architecture of sheltering domesticity. Equally strong, but different in its statuesque look that blends massive stability with the inner throbbing of tectonic metamorphosis, is the aluminium and cast concrete sculpture with a chair and mountain range that probes an intimately atmospheric as well as palpable approximation towards vastness, solidity and height.
Art and activism
Among the interesting events that Jaaga has resumed was a presentation of the South Indian encounters of two young European artists Artur Van Balen and Tilly Feguson. Their multifarious field reaches out for practical connections between art and activism around conscientious socio-political and environmental concerns that involve them directly in normal preoccupations from an online collective to supporting activist court cases and farming.
At the time when art increasingly wishes to enter actual life, its manifestation often happens during concrete actions by artists and non-artists. What others come to know is mostly documentation in its informative rather than artistic aspect. The "Special Thali of Resistance" video and the inflatable rubber type furniture on view (February 2 and 3) could be understood right only with some explaining.
Even then the spectator only learned about the artists' familiarising themselves with local activism proper without its heightened experience. What with an unpretentious grace came close to the latter was the accompanying booklet where simple reportage mingled with drawings that keep shifting from the realistically or naively literal to the rough sensitivity of sketching and strengthening it with partial photography.
Even though one trusts the talent of Sakshi Gupta, her exhibitions do not fail to surprise with their amazingly novel qualities, in particular that focused on complex insights and concepts.
It lets those be intuited, felt and recognised in the sheer sensation of the tactile visual presence of her works. In fact, desiring her sculptures to be sensed rather than verbally explained, the artist resists titling the individual pieces and extensively commenting on the whole.
Remembering Gupta's earlier emphasis on the unnatural, yet overwhelmingly breathing matter of our world where organic substances become increasingly substituted by and blended with the metallic of the man-made. "Become the Wind", her third solo at Galleryske (January 24 to March 13), strikes thanks to its calmer and subtler character that allows the viewer to grasp contradictory conditions, moods and aspirations as reconciled, instead of uncomfortable and reaching one's mind's eye through its intangible poetic content inherent in the physicality of the images.
More than the contrariness of the current changes in reality and in the individual, the concern remains with the processes of this transformation during which stability anchored in familiar environs or past forms have to negotiate the new present in a continuous state of evolution, admitting the openness of one's desires and of the future.
In consequence, an aesthetically different feature here belongs to the much more whole and animated being-like appearance of the metal scrap substances of the sculptures whose origin sometimes can hardly be guessed. Eventually, the impact is of a loftier, lyrical striving, attuning to oneself as well as to the surroundings, especially those of landscape and of home while discovering parallels between someone's leaving behind the skin of previous notions, ideals or feelings during personal development and nature's altering and shedding its old shapes to grow new or just more plentiful ones.
The metaphor being incorporated in the used and abandoned scrap material itself, when handled, now becomes subdued for the sake of nuanced and broader expressiveness to the extent that sometimes the multitudes of hard iron almost loose their rudimentary properties emphasising in-between or simultaneously opposite conditions.
The dense iron rods that build the body of a smallish entity on the floor at the entrance seem to be nearly molten particles of a crust that may belong to some fleshy, dried leaf or a shell pregnant with seeds but may also be already becoming some sort of animal about to stir, as the spectator easily identifies with the circumstances on the wished for verge.
The immense sculpture inside the gallery evokes the grandeur of the life cycle as it captures a virtual forest of scaly creepers yielding, literally shedding their substance to the meatier mound of an elephant mother who in turn offers herself in child-birth. If fragility and pain can be guessed under the overwhelming, empowering transformation of the she animal, another sculpture of a baby elephant empathises with its under-confidence and the efforts of relieving self-reassurance, the trunk wrapped tightly several times round its smooth-exposed body.
The second enormous, towering piece with fan blades slowly moving round between the filigree foliaged branches of a columnar tree invites one's attention to the flora perceived and felt yet through the architecture of sheltering domesticity. Equally strong, but different in its statuesque look that blends massive stability with the inner throbbing of tectonic metamorphosis, is the aluminium and cast concrete sculpture with a chair and mountain range that probes an intimately atmospheric as well as palpable approximation towards vastness, solidity and height.
Art and activism
Among the interesting events that Jaaga has resumed was a presentation of the South Indian encounters of two young European artists Artur Van Balen and Tilly Feguson. Their multifarious field reaches out for practical connections between art and activism around conscientious socio-political and environmental concerns that involve them directly in normal preoccupations from an online collective to supporting activist court cases and farming.
At the time when art increasingly wishes to enter actual life, its manifestation often happens during concrete actions by artists and non-artists. What others come to know is mostly documentation in its informative rather than artistic aspect. The "Special Thali of Resistance" video and the inflatable rubber type furniture on view (February 2 and 3) could be understood right only with some explaining.
Even then the spectator only learned about the artists' familiarising themselves with local activism proper without its heightened experience. What with an unpretentious grace came close to the latter was the accompanying booklet where simple reportage mingled with drawings that keep shifting from the realistically or naively literal to the rough sensitivity of sketching and strengthening it with partial photography.