This Thursday, the city will get to experience a new solo art exhibition at the Mirchandani + Steinruecke gallery in Colaba. The show, titled Level, will feature 16 artworks by Tanya Goel, a young Delhi-based artist. The works on display include three frescoes and one major site-specific wall drawing.
Goel’s exhibits, which are in the abstract mode, draw their inspiration from experiences of surfaces in contemporary urbanity. They bring together the three themes that have animated Goel as an artist: colour, technology and construction. “I love walking around whichever city I live in. Construction is something you cannot escape if you live in a city,” she explains. “For me, it begins with looking at things and not being able to understand or recognise what I am seeing. A building under construction is like a skeleton under the X-ray. I am drawn to these things that do not yet add up to anything.” Her appreciation of an edifice in progress, and its consequent acquisition of purpose and a meaning, allow her to capture alternative meanings out of the familiar.
This deep interest in construction goes back to 2010 when, having just completed her MFA degree at Yale University, Goel produced a series of works centered around the blue tarpaulin sheets used in construction.
In it, the fabric’s condition, its wear and tear over time, became a larger metaphor for the city and its means of production. Her latest work continues to engage with this interest. This time she’s explored different materials. “I ended up collecting fragments of architecture — small pieces of cement or stone — breaking those fragments down into pigment and getting a whole archive of dust and colour from these construction sites. That then became the base for this work.”
A second theme in Goel’s work is technology. So, the grids in her works are not limited to simply architecture. They’re an allusion and reference to digital grids, like the ones within gadgets’ screens. “I was a doing a lot of experimentation with old technology since 2011-12. All kinds of screens — mobile and television — but those that were slightly dysfunctional.” Goel’s muse is the glitch she catches in a screen. She is drawn to ‘errors’ like the white noise of a bad TV transmission. For instance, she would expose an old monitor to different external situations, all the while documenting how the glitches behaved and changed patterns. An underlying factor that connects her works is her fundamental pre-occupation with colour. “There are so many factors in how you see, right?” she says. “There is the scientific and the psychological. We don't see it in the same way. The rainbow refracts for you differently than it does for me.”
The primarily subjective nature of colour is made more interesting for Goel by its dynamism and its ephemeral nature.
“Light and colour are constantly moving; you could call this wall white, but through the day as the light has changed, it has been anything but what you see it as now.”
However, Goel hasn’t quite found what she’s looking for, the search, it seems, is still on.
“Somebody is walking in front of a facade, the metal shutter of a shop, red passing by, a reflection of a car. This is basically life; all these moments that come together. Interest in colour is about being able to discern what happens when this is placed next to that and ask why did that little magical moment happen there?”
According to Goel, the greatest possibility of these situations occurring is in industrial materials. Of late, she’s obsessed with neon she saw in Delhi due to a shift in plastic manufacturing.
“My studio has become an archive of materials,” she says. Goel’s vision comes from a post-industrialist urbanism. And her aim through these works is to disrupt the familiarity of spaces and visual experiences of the cities we live in.
Goel’s vision
Ranjana Steinruecke, Director, Galerie Mirachandani + Steinruecke, has been working with Goel over the last four years, seeing Goel’s vision evolve into its present form. Steinruecke says she has watched Goel take on a monumental scale in paintings in which pigment is embedded.
“A layer at a time, with such precision, that these paintings offer a new experience of physicality. Her work can be placed in relation to larger histories of abstraction and minimalism, and there is the performative aspect of her process-oriented practice.”
(Level begins Thursday at 6 pm, with a conversation between the artist and Justine Ludwig, Director of Exhibitions, Dallas Contemporary. The exhibition is on till February 18, 2016)
Three themes have animated Tanya Goel as an artist: colour, technology and construction
