Jitish Kallat
(1974)
Autosaurus Tripous
Jitish Kallat calls the streets of Mumbai, the city of his birth, his “unofficial academy”, with the texture of life in a metropolis deeply informing his work. The artist has said, “...the overcrowded and media-saturated street festooned with billboards, provided me with my themes as well as my artistic language.” (Artist quoted in Deepak Ananth, “Delirious Entropy”, June Y Gwak, Yulhee Kim, Dang Dan eds., Jitish Kallat: 365 Lives, Seoul:...
Jitish Kallat calls the streets of Mumbai, the city of his birth, his “unofficial academy”, with the texture of life in a metropolis deeply informing his work. The artist has said, “...the overcrowded and media-saturated street festooned with billboards, provided me with my themes as well as my artistic language.” (Artist quoted in Deepak Ananth, “Delirious Entropy”, June Y Gwak, Yulhee Kim, Dang Dan eds., Jitish Kallat: 365 Lives, Seoul: Arario Gallery, 2007, p. 25) The rickshaw is an omnipresent sight in the city, an outmoded “plebian survivor in the rapidly mutating environment of urban India.” (Ananth, p. 7) It shows up in his paintings as a way to interrogate obsolescence, death, time and the nature of urban existence in a place as chaotic as Mumbai. Lot 3 is the first in a series of sculptures that present vehicles as wasted animal carcasses, born from studies the artist made of his visual archive of riot-destroyed vehicles. Kallat noted the regular, almost expected, practice of mobs to direct their anger at vehicles even if they have nothing to do with the issue at hand. “I began seeing these vehicles as receptacles of human folly. Even as they perish from being functional objects through these inane acts of ‘cremation’, their charred bodies begin to resemble those of deceased creatures.” (Artist quoted in “Jitish Kallat in Conversation with Nina Miall”, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient, London: Haunch of Venison, 2008, p. 50) The osteal rickshaw cuts a playful figure that Kallat describes as “grotesque, burlesque and arabesque in equal measure.” The intentional absurdity of its size and placement reminds one at once of an exhibit of a longextinct genus at a museum of natural history, a child’s toy and a showcase at a car show, allowing for a richer interaction between the piece and viewer. The tongue-in-cheek approach to delivering a picture of destruction and decay succeeds in impressing on one its “inscription of death and mortality that refers to recurrent themes in my practice.” (Artist quoted in Jitish Kallat : Universal Recipient, p. 50)
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Lot
3
of
55
Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000
Rs 66,40,000 - 99,60,000
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ARTWORK DETAILS
Jitish Kallat
Autosaurus Tripous
2007
Resin, paint, steel, brass
53.25 x 102 x 66.25 in (135 x 259 x 168 cm)
Third from a limited edition of three and one artist's proof
PROVENANCE Acquired from Albion, London Property from an Important European Collection
EXHIBITEDJitish Kallat: Unclaimed Baggage , London: Albion, 10 October - 19 November 2007 (another from the edition)Sweatopia , Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road, 8 December 2007 - 4 January 2008 (another from the edition)Jitish Kallat: Aquasaurus , Sydney: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 25 October - 20 December 2008 (another from the edition)India Contemporary , The Hague: GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 28 March - 21 June 2009 (another from the edition)Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India , Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 31 May - 8 December 2012 (another from the edition)Here After Here , New Delhi: NGMA, 14 January - 14 March 2017 (another from the edition) PUBLISHEDJitish Kallat: Unclaimed Baggage , London: Albion, 2007, cover and pp. 69, 71-75, 77-79, 81-82 (illustrated, another from the edition)Jitish Kallat: Aquasaurus , Sydney: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2008, p. 18 (illustrated, another from the edition)India Contemporary , The Hague: GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009, cover and pp. 32-35 (illustrated, another from the edition) Tami Freiman-Katz and Rotem Ruff eds., Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India , Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2012, p. 104 (illustrated, another from the edition)Here After Here , New Delhi: NGMA, 2017, pp. 46-47 (illustrated, another from the edition)
Category: Sculpture
Style: Unknown