Zeenat Nagree

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  picks December 17, 2019

  P.R. Satheesh

  Eyes—alert and alarmed—pop out of P. R. Satheesh’s paintings. Their gazes evoke the aftermath of a tense encounter, its charge still lingering. With this focus on the ocular, and the interplay of consciousness it suggests, the differences between Satheesh’s subjects—be they human, fish, or insect—seem not to matter. They all appear troubled or shocked, much like the men and women who bare their teeth in F. N. Souza’s paintings, here jostling for space in dense compositions made between 2014 and 2019.

  There is an echo of Pollock’s movement in Satheesh’s skeins of paint, though he is less interested

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  print December 2019

  Priya Ravish Mehra

  Priya Ravish Mehra spent her summers in her grandfather’s house in Najibabad in northern India, where she often saw rafoogars, or darners, who would come to collect rare shawls and other heirlooms from local households for repair. Mehra’s interest in textiles grew over the years and led her to study weaving in the early 1990s at Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan, where her parents were also once students. What Mehra learned during that time—and immediately after at London’s Royal College of Art and West Dean College in West Sussex, UK, where she specialized in making tapestries—helped

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  print April 2019

  Navjot Altaf

  In her retrospective presentation of Navjot Altaf’s career, curator Nancy Adajania refrained from using chronology to organize the artist’s five decades of work. Instead, she traced patterns across the breadth of Altaf’s oeuvre, bringing together the artist’s varied preoccupations—from environmental destruction, intercommunal conflict, and disenfranchisement of the working class to discrimination against women and queer communities—to underline their interconnectedness in the rise of fascism in India today.

  In the exhibition “The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out,” we met an artist who, while conscious of

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  picks August 01, 2018

  “Apple in Dream Mode”

  In keeping with various strands of philosophical inquiry that take their fundamental principle a critique of Cartesian mind-body duality, “Apple in Dream Mode,” curated by John Xaviers, suggests through its title that nonhuman entities have interior lives. Yet rather than claim access to opaque worlds, the four artists included in this exhibition speculate on the frontiers and limits of human perception.

  Mochu’s five-minute video Painted diagram of a future voyage (Who Believes the Lens?), 2013, uses principles of anamorphosis to distort colonial-era aquatints by British painters Thomas and

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  performance April 2018

  TO PRESERVE AND PROTEST

  ON FEBRUARY 5, 2018, a half man, half bull riding a black-and-white horse made a grand entrance into the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s premier fine-arts institution. Wearing curved horns attached to a woven rope net that covered his torso, the imposing beast sat on his steed, which was draped with a red caparison, and surveyed the area. Although a strange sight for pedestrians, the bull-man cut a familiar figure for members of the art community, who know him as a recurring character in the work of artist Mahbubur Rahman. Pointedly, he led the charge that evening

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  print April 2018

  CANAN

  At the entrance of CANAN’s retrospective exhibition, “Behind Mount Qaf,” we were told that we had reached heaven. Already? Here, in an exhibition divided by floors into sections corresponding to heaven, purgatory, and hell, heaven’s inhabitants turned out to be a menagerie of sequined dragons, glittering snakes, and other stuffed creatures (Animal Kingdom, 2017) and human figures skipping along on a rotating cylinder of rainbow-hued tulle (Heaven, 2017). Amid this abundance, one noticed a small screen showing a video of engorged breasts dripping milk (Fountain, 2000). This was not the river of

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  picks March 28, 2018

  “Four Pillars”

  In the exhibition “Four Pillars,” Hanna Hur, Laurie Kang, Maia Ruth Lee, and Zadie Xa together lead a viewer to reconsider the charged symbols and organic ephemera their works employ. Hur’s pale drawings on silk, such as Nervy, 2017, treat flowers, the sun, the moon, and spiders as variations of a sphere, their rays and tentacles reaching outward. Kang’s darkroom prints take impressions of lotus roots, moths, leaves, and twigs, while Lee’s geometric patterns rendered in steel and arranged in tableaux with bowls of rice, such as Mother’s Knot, 2018, suggest the performance of ritual, the quotidian

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  picks September 06, 2017

  Amitesh Shrivastava

  Animals and humans appear in flashes then dissolve into ambiguous textures in Amitesh Shrivastava’s paintings. Their earthy palette, with highlights of blue and green, and thick brushstrokes leave the forms in a state of suspension between body and landscape. In Translators I, 2017, there is a forested terrain with cliffs, which could also be the furry backs of swiftly moving animals, fleeing or gathering for an attack. These two aspects of the painting seemingly pull in and out of focus, offering us muddled memories or a dream.

  Exhibition didactics reveal that the scenes depict rural India,

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  picks February 05, 2016

  Celia Perrin Sidarous

  Many of the black-and-white and color photographs that constitute Celia Perrin Sidarous’s current solo show, “Les Figures,” document her travels in Greece, Italy, and Norway. Images such as Cyprès, Pompeii (all works cited, 2015) and Palm, Ancient Agora of Athens offer unspectacular views of the titular subjects. On the walls of the Parisian Laundry in Montreal, these photographs provide clues to how Sidarous came to create other images, also on view, that depict assemblages of found objects. Was the piece of coral placed on a mirror in Black Coral a memento from Greece, or the green-gray ovoid

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  diary September 24, 2015

  Golden Gates

  “IT SMELLS like the late ’80s!” dealer Christopher D’Amelio beamed last weekend. Two days ahead of the opening of EXPO Chicago, he was experiencing a delightful déjà vu. We were at the home of collectors Marilyn and Larry Fields, discussing galleries like White Cube that were returning to the fair after a hiatus. Outside, Lake Michigan shimmered. Inside, dealers circled around the Fields’ collection, turn-by-turn seeking audience with the hosts. It was a convivial atmosphere in which to celebrate the city and its signature art-world event. Four years into director Tony Karman’s revamped fair,

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  picks September 14, 2015

  Rodrigo Lara Zendejas

  Rodrigo Lara Zendejas’s modest solo show, “Deportable Aliens,” mourning the forced removal of people of Mexican descent from the US in the aftermath of the Great Depression, shouldn’t be taken only as a history lesson. The artist’s timely critique of this reprehensible operation gains urgency in the context of Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Even if Lara creates fragmentary memorials to the victims of the euphemistically named Mexican Repatriation, we can’t help but think about the targets of such policies today.

  The show features thirty-four white porcelain sculptures arranged on a bare wooden

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  picks February 06, 2015

  V.S. Gaitonde

  There’s mystery surrounding the output of V.S. Gaitonde, perhaps because—up until this succinct exhibition—he has received no comprehensive survey. While not quite a full fledged account, “V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life,” presents a nuanced narrative around India’s foremost abstract painter’s life and philosophy, offering a wide selection of his most accomplished abstracts from the 1970s and ’80s.

  Gaitonde preferred to call his work non-objective rather than abstract and was influenced as much by Wassily Kandinsky as scroll painting and Zen Buddhism. In Painting No. 1, 1962,