Important Notice

N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. Through his body of work, “Harsha presents aspects of Indian national life, its peculiarities, its intractable problems, its strange conjunctions, its... N.S. Harsha, winner of the third Artes Mundi prize, draws from several Indian artistic practices, ranging from Mughal and Pahari miniature painting and ancient frescoes to popular murals and wall paintings, in creating his detailed works on paper, large paintings, and site-specific installations. Through his body of work, “Harsha presents aspects of Indian national life, its peculiarities, its intractable problems, its strange conjunctions, its enchantment and its comedy like a series of instructive scenarios, lessons that must be learnt, situations that must be understood and dealt with by the next generation of Indians. His works reveal a political commentary within a framework of Indian miniature painting, the modern Indian narrative tradition and popular art. In terms of style and address Harsha’s works take from the milieu of children’s textbooks. They are schematic, didactic and visually reduced” (Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture, MuHKA – Musee d’Art Contemporain press dossier, Antwerp, 2008, p. 10).

Using the formal devices of scale and multiplicity, the artist humourously populates his canvases of epic proportions with minutely detailed figures and motifs, each one unique and painstakingly detailed. This juxtaposition of scale and content first engages viewers from a distance, and then draws them closer and closer till they begin to question the oppositional concepts of diversity and divisiveness, community and individualism, and personal and global politics that the artist grappled with in creating these works.

In this monumental and dark diptych, for example, Harsha addresses some of the issues plaguing the agricultural sector in India, particularly the severe shortages and difficulties that have pushed rural farmers to take their own lives in large numbers in the recent past. Initially, the viewer is assailed with images of two large skeletons lying next to each other in a head to toe arrangement. On closer examination, however, it turns out that these skeletons are actually a series of ridges in the vast stretches of parched land that is intermittently dotted with the diminutive figures of meditating holy men and women with piles of skulls and bones, and surveyors and engineers in suits and hard-hats. The contrast between these two sets of figures sets the stage for Harsha’s witty commentary on the divergent solutions proffered to solve the issues plaguing rural, agricultural India, ranging from the religious to the scientific.

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