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Born in an Orissa village in 1970, Jagannath Panda's artistic concerns center on the oppositional forces he encountered during his travels to megalopolises including Mumbai, New Delhi, London and Tokyo, where he held his first solo show. Chief among these is the tense balance maintained between natural life and urbanization, which, by extension, probes the dichotomy of tradition and modernity.

The artist paints nature with an almost... Born in an Orissa village in 1970, Jagannath Panda's artistic concerns center on the oppositional forces he encountered during his travels to megalopolises including Mumbai, New Delhi, London and Tokyo, where he held his first solo show. Chief among these is the tense balance maintained between natural life and urbanization, which, by extension, probes the dichotomy of tradition and modernity.

The artist paints nature with an almost child-like wonderment, frequently ornamenting the surfaces of his insects, animals, birds and trees with rich fabrics to magnify their significance in environments where they are crowded and threatened by human development and settlement. "The use of animals and plants… enables Panda to address environmental concerns, to speak of the collision of Nature with Culture which has become so predominant in India today. How can the developmental needs of an increasingly avaricious urban society be resolved with the necessity to protect wildlife habitats and to respect the values of indigenous communities? By using animals as his protagonists, Panda alludes to a desired circularity where the reciprocal influence between the cultures of the powerful and the subordinate can be at balance" (Peter Nagy, Jagannath Panda: Nothing is Solid, Chemould Prescott Road exhibition catalogue, 2007, not paginated).

In this diptych, the artist presents a cityscape with a row of buildings in the background and a richly adorned tree with its resident birds and demon in the foreground. Overturning the expectations of his viewers, Panda employs this kind of "deliberately de-contextualized space" like he does the glittering brocades that adorn his works, to highlight what they so willingly overlook. "Panda's motifs often allude to the underlying forces that drive the social mechanism. He shows a profound understanding of the threats to stability and individual independence that are inherent in contemporary society" (Paths of Progression, Saffronart and Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

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