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Lot 23

 

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In the early years of the 21st century, when instantaneous visual communication has gifted or cursed us with an avalanche of images from every corner of the world, it is often misleading to speak of a contemporary artist’s work as characteristically French or American or German, Japanese or Chinese or Indian — when it is better considered as arising from the worldwide merging of cultures and peoples.

National characteristics...
In the early years of the 21st century, when instantaneous visual communication has gifted or cursed us with an avalanche of images from every corner of the world, it is often misleading to speak of a contemporary artist’s work as characteristically French or American or German, Japanese or Chinese or Indian — when it is better considered as arising from the worldwide merging of cultures and peoples.

National characteristics remain, of course, and in the case of Anil Revri we encounter the richly nuanced art of an artist who was born in New Delhi, whose taproots are in that specific and tangible part of the world, and who draws primary inspiration from that remembered and often revisited landscape. The vivid cultural particularities of India are also of great importance to him and his work. Thus, it is significant that his mother was an accomplished classical Indian dancer.

Revri completed his undergraduate design studies at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai (1977) and for the next five years, traveled and exhibited in India, France, Britain and the Netherlands before coming to the United States in 1982.

Anil Revri's oeuvre can be divided into two distinct groups. The first group consists of the abstract drawings and paintings executed from 1976 to 1996, which exploit the liquidity of the medium to arrive at biomorphic formations seemingly in a constant state of flux. The second group of works, executed after 1996, is sur-real in that it seeks to give form to experiences of a spiritual nature, through the technique of geometric abstraction.

In his essay for Revri’s retrospective exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, J. W. Mahoney, art critic for Art in America wrote, “How does Anil Revri’s art work? And why is it new? Paintings are places we know we can enter and withdraw from at our leisure. We look into a painting or drawing, spend time working its ideas and its presence into our own minds and hearts, and feel free to judge it, play with and inside it, be confused by it. In Revri’s work, your eye, travels into a piece, encounters, beyond natural visual pleasure, a kind of arresting pressure toward an unseen but thoroughly present openness. The work serves as a gateway into a weirdly natural spaciousness: a singularity experience, of a “point at which a function takes an infinite value.” Again, what we may be looking at is a geometric abstraction, but what we’re receiving is a fiercely voluntary journey into a primal experience of an invisible reality that clearly includes us, not as viewers but as participants. This is a singularity, a set of conditions that is set to open into a limitless passageway to another reality. This reality doesn’t stop; only the duration of our attention does. This is new. Anil Revri is using an easily readable modernist language, of ordered abstraction, not to produce a critique of arts language, but to validate a reality beyond the personal — by taking your awareness into it.”

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