Artist and art consultant Sharmistha Ray is back to her first love: painting, via “Hidden Geographies”, her first solo show after a stint as Managing Director of Bodhi Art Gallery (Mumbai). In this body of oils on canvas, Ray postulates canonical ideals of beauty and the sublime by distilling her memories, photographs, observations and experiences of landscapes, both urban and natural. The metascapes of Sharmistha Ray are suspended in time between mythos and reality, between abstraction and it's opposite, exposing an intimate and charged topography of the subconscious mind.
“The idea has been gestating for a while. I was busy with my arts management career, but wanted to come back to painting. Of course, the years in between really fuelled new ideas and I was excited to manifest these in oil paint on canvas. That's my main medium. Ranjana and Usha from Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke happened to see my work and offered me a solo show. Painting as a contemporary art form has taken a backseat to the discourse around new media in India. This is a strange phenomenon, because worldwide, painting still forms an important part of the discussion around art practices. This show fuses concepts of art history together with contemporary practices in painting to create large format metascapes. I have also radically altered my colour palette making it as empirical and personal as possible,” says Sharmistha.
Bottomline: Metascapes that negotiate opposites: mythos and reality.
Hidden Geographies: An Exhibition of New Paintings, Sharmistha Ray at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, till February 18, 2012 Tuesday – Saturday 11 am to 7 pm, Phone: +91 22 2202 3030/ 3434 info@galeriems.com
