Important Notice

Nataraj Sharma's move from Bangalore to Vadodara in the 1990s brought about a striking transformation in his creative process and body of work. Unlike his early figurative canvases that highlighted various aspects of the human condition through the lives of city dwellers and labourers, his Vadodara works featured barren, industrial landscapes populated by displaced machine parts.

In the present lot, a large canvas, Sharma paints the... Nataraj Sharma's move from Bangalore to Vadodara in the 1990s brought about a striking transformation in his creative process and body of work. Unlike his early figurative canvases that highlighted various aspects of the human condition through the lives of city dwellers and labourers, his Vadodara works featured barren, industrial landscapes populated by displaced machine parts.

In the present lot, a large canvas, Sharma paints the interior of a seemingly abandoned machine shop, its floor and tabletops littered with industrial parts and equipment. The artist also offers a brief glimpse of the landscape beyond the walls of the factory, a bleak rust-red expanse populated by a single labourer hunched over his shovel, and a truck belching smoke into the toxic magenta sky. The artist explains, "Moving to the outskirts of this city in western India, I was confronted with a primal, elemental landscape dotted by factories that looked extremely desolate in the summer. The world might be at the forefront of technology but for us these outdated factories and chunky machines are an everyday reality. I am not here to make moralistic statements about our oil-stained and garbage strewn landscapes. I want to seek the peculiar beauty of these desolate structures. Their permanence is comforting" (Real in Realism, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2002, not paginated).

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