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Lot 40

 

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Born in Kolkata in 1965, Anandajit Ray’s body of work playfully draws on India’s miniature tradition, Pop Art, comic strips, and the work of the Surrealists to offer viewers a release from reality and its burdens. His diverse oeuvre, including miniaturist works in gouache, cut up paintings rearranged as visual puzzles, and large sculptural installations, is animated by a sense of the surreal. “Contrary to [the] tendency of finding roots and... Born in Kolkata in 1965, Anandajit Ray’s body of work playfully draws on India’s miniature tradition, Pop Art, comic strips, and the work of the Surrealists to offer viewers a release from reality and its burdens. His diverse oeuvre, including miniaturist works in gouache, cut up paintings rearranged as visual puzzles, and large sculptural installations, is animated by a sense of the surreal. “Contrary to [the] tendency of finding roots and placing, Ray’s aesthetic leanings impelled him to find ways to uproot and displace the world: to let loose a tornado of artistic fantasy to sweep and translocate the world with all its objects…Through a richly imaginative collage-aesthetic, Ray carefully constructs a paranormal world caught in suspended animation…The situation here isn’t very different from a fluctuating television screen simultaneously broadcasting a cricket match and a war dance with a songbird’s warble for soundtrack” (Jitish Kallat, “A Concentrated Brew”, Art India, Vol. 3, Issue 3, Mumbai, 1998, p. 80).

In his more recent sculptures, Ray transcends the physical confines of his miniature-like works on paper, turning instead to a collection of three-dimensional objects. Although the focus of these sculptural works is still on figuration, particularly of the human form, their imagery is not as complex and demanding. In the present lot, the steel ball bearings affixed to the arm represent droplets of water which, rather than flowing away, have defied gravity to adhere to the form in the surreal manner familiar to his oeuvre.

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