Wound: Somnath Hore, Farida Batool, Shyamal Dutta-Ray, Saad Qureshi, Salman Toor
30th October to 28th November 2009
Private view: Thursday 29th October, 6.30pm - 9.00pm
"Wounds is what I see everywhere around me. A scarred tree, a road gouged by truck tyre, a man knifed for no visible or rational reason…." Somnath Hore
In the early 1940s Somnath Hore worked as a newspaper illustrator, providing visual documentation of Bengal Famine of 1943. After that Hore went on to Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta and up until his death in 2006 aged 86, Hore produced politically committed art in a variety of mediums including lino-cut, woodblock print, etching and wax sculpture as well as the pulp-print technique which he developed himself. Throughout his career he would return to the idea of the wound, as a fissure which would not heal. This was made manifest in his white on white 'Wound Series' made from paper pulp. For Hore the process of producing the viscosity of the paper pulp was a simile for the formation of a wound.
Aicon Gallery is proud to present the first significant showing of a number of Hore's 'Wound Series' in the UK in lower ground floor gallery. Taking this series of works as a starting point, we also present a group show, 'Wound' in the ground floor gallery that includes the works of Farida Batool, Shyamal Dutta-Ray, Saad Qureshi and Salman Toor.
Farida Batool's works (b.1970) attest to the scars in Pakistani society caused by decades of unrest. She often uses lenticular prints in which the image changes when the viewer moves position in order to portray contrasting realities - for example in 'Sohni Dharti I' a child wearing a suicide-bomb vest appears in a field of flowers and then disappears again as the viewer moves. In this and other works by Batool the superficial calm is ruptured by the hidden image which suddenly emerges.
Shyamal Dutta-Ray (1934 -2005) produced a body of work that was socially committed and that portrayed the masses, including workmen, folk singers, crowds in bazaars and villagers. By limiting his watercolour palette to a dark range of colours Dutta-Ray's paintings are infused with a sense of existentialist melancholy. The figures in his paintings resemble those from puppet theatre, there limbs jerked at awkward angles, at the mercy of an unforgiving higher reality.
Saad Qureshi's (b.1986) small canvases are hung like shelves protruding from walls, their largely empty surfaces facing upwards. Eruptions appear at the edges of the canvases or in others there are intricate drawings on these parts of the frame that are usually ignored. Other materials that Qureshi utilises include burnt prayer mats and stiff long-cooked chapatis piled high in an echo of Brancusi, rotting slowly from within as they age. Qureshi's work plays with the notion of the margins and what can erupt from there.
Salman Toor (b.1983) sees himself as Pakistani but makes paintings which look like 19th century Western academy paintings, varnished oils steeped in realism, that nod toward Gericault, Van Dyck, Rubens and David. Some of them depict Islamic clerics and minors in their charge who they seemingly have just had sex with; the nod to Degas in 'After Degas' is specifically to Degas's painting 'The Rape'. The disjuncture between Toor's graceful handling of paint and subject matter is further complicated by Toor's choice of a deliberately Western academic style.
For further press information and visuals please contact Rachel Phillipps: rachel@picklespr.com
For further queries about the exhibition please contact Niru Ratnam:
niru@aicongallery.com
Aicon Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm
8 Heddon Street
London W1B 4BU
020 7734 7575
www.aicongallery.com