Important Notice

"It could be that one
Of the most important
Function of art
Is to make men aware
Of the greatness
They do not know
They have in themselves."

- Andre Malraux

Artist Papri Bose Mehta, who strives to define and attain the universal purpose of art through her works, seeks inspiration from the above famous lines of the famous French author, who had penned The Psychology of Art." ... "It could be that one
Of the most important
Function of art
Is to make men aware
Of the greatness
They do not know
They have in themselves."

- Andre Malraux

Artist Papri Bose Mehta, who strives to define and attain the universal purpose of art through her works, seeks inspiration from the above famous lines of the famous French author, who had penned The Psychology of Art."

Expressing her concerns as an artist, she mentions:

"I have been painting since I was two
How much can you paint what you see?
I have felt it important to dig
Dig a hole, sink deeper pushing the boundaries of the unconscious."

Papri Bose Mehta, born in 1954, took the paint brush in her hand at the tender age of two. Years later, possibly luxuriating with the knowledge that she can sacrifice all her artistic inhibitions, she has calmly sublimated the powers of illusory picture-making to prize out cameos of ideas and emotions from an internal source.

The iconography of her art is replete with mystical symbols and metaphors, scripting it fundamentally as her language. Papri's works are meditative, serene and tranquil, inflecting her lived experiences to arrive at a definitive phase in her artistic journey. The collective unconscious is inhabited by motifs and drives common to all human kind. Papri Bose furthers this universe of the unconscious with reveries that seem to start and freeze at her will.

Papri held her first solo exhibition at the age of 18. She began her artistic forays as a perceptual painter, indulging in the sensuousness of the world around her, transcribing in paints the everyday objects and life. She studied Applied Art at Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai from 1972 to 1977. In 1981-82 she was at the Volk Kunst Schule, Vienna, and later at the International Summer Academy, Austria. It was her experiences as a student of painting in Vienna that she nurtured the freedom of her creative instincts aided in the process by her professor whose pedagogy she felt was different and levitating. This set her on the path to artistic and inventive formulations where her approach to painting metamorphosed, enabling a direct engagement with the canvas that was extempore so to speak.

Papri's modus operandi in her latest series of works, which she exhibited at Apparao Gallery, Chennai early in 2002 is minimal. Adding another dimension to her works is a subtle play of textures that she creates with palette knife to enhance the delicate tension between the decorative and the representational. In addition to this she plays wittily with pictograms and numbers that she has personally evolved to be almost her signature buttressing the illusive and intriguing aspects of her works. To portray an inward journey of an individual, which in this instance becomes her own iconography, Papri has successfully mediated with the technique to essentially realise this.

She has no premeditated concepts and she confronts the canvas directly to articulate her ideas without preliminary studies of sketches or drawings. She explains, "As I confront the canvas, it is chaotic, but slowly the forms emerge gaining in consistency. Once I reach a silent zone after which it is a dialogue between me and the canvas till the whole composition is finished."

The aesthetics of Papri's creations subsume the process/growth/evolution of an individual's journey. The artist herself is baffled at the imagery and variety of forms that take shape on the canvas for consciously she neither meditates upon them nor intellectually rationalises to bring them forth. She reveals, "I am myself surprised by the emerging contents, colors and forms. The symbols emerge to inform and transform one another in the process.''

Her subconscious throws up primordial imagery in forms like snake, sperms, trident, flowers, etc. that Jung, the 20th Century psychologist, categorised as collective unconscious. The colors are spiritual and soothing; solemn and sombre with an ascetic affinity in the successful deployment of oranges and its related tones. In one particular work, she forces the viewer to ask as how does one define the bowl in the painting, "is it bowl in space or space in bowl"? And craftily deploying three golden oranges at the corner of the painting, Papri takes the weight of the green bowl to fix it within the contemplative space. This perceptual management is the salient feature of her oeuvre. Her imagery has a surrealistic feel and understandably so because it is an inner lived reality.

She has held several solo exhibitions in Mumbai, and has participated in major group shows in Mumbai and New York at Cymroza Art Gallery Mumbai (1972), Jehangir Art Gallery (1984, 1992), Taj Art Gallery (1985), Chemould Gallery (1987, 1999) and Apparao Gallery, Chennai (2002).

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