Meow. That’s the name of an upcoming Tamil thriller which has a Persian cat named Selfie playing the lead role. In tandem with the title, Art Houz inaugurated a show called Framed Feline recently. With as many as 80 artworks curated by the gallery, the exhibition, which is on till May 21, is all about cats.
The range of works includes abstract paintings by popular artist A.V. Ilango, besides those by Kasa Vinay Kumar, Selva Senthil Kumar, Deepa Jayaraman, Kushal Kumar, and around 40 others. That apart, there are unique displays of a 100 small cat sculptures made of clay, and a whole feline form carved out of one pencil.
At the event, senior artists N. Jayakumar and A. Viswam spoke about how cats have influenced some great works of art — be it the series by one of the highest-paid Indian artists, R.B. Bhaskaran, or 19th-Century English artist Louis Wain, who was commonly known as ‘The man who drew cats’. Incidentally, the world’s largest cat painting, titled My Wife’s Lovers, by Austrian artist Carl Kahler, was sold off at Sotheby’s, New York, for a massive $826,000 last November.
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The exhibition was an attempt to club two forms of art: visual art and movies. Producer of Meow, and owner of Art Houz, Vincent Adaikalaraj, said the movie includes a fresh team, and an engaging plot with plenty of visual effects. “In the story, the cat gets possessed with the ghost of a girl, who is a rape survivor. How the cat then takes revenge on the criminals makes up the plot,” he added. While the shoot was completed a year ago, the project, directed by Chinnas Palanisamy, is still in post-production , and set to release later this year.