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Lot 51

 

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In his early figurative pieces, executed whilst living in Bangalore, Nataraj Sharma often found himself focusing on the struggles and concerns of the rapidly growing proletariat of urban India. Thus between 1990 and 1994, the expanding city’s construction sites and toiling labourers, together with other images of the subaltern, dominated the artist’s work. The artist’s canvases from this period, like the present lot, are crowded with tableaus... In his early figurative pieces, executed whilst living in Bangalore, Nataraj Sharma often found himself focusing on the struggles and concerns of the rapidly growing proletariat of urban India. Thus between 1990 and 1994, the expanding city’s construction sites and toiling labourers, together with other images of the subaltern, dominated the artist’s work. The artist’s canvases from this period, like the present lot, are crowded with tableaus portraying the human form, almost always masculine, at work and at rest.

Here, labourers carry construction materials in bulky gunny sacks swung over their shoulders and backs. Barefoot and wearing no protective clothing, these men are symbolic of the constant exploitation of the subaltern and also of the skewed development and urbanization that allows this to happen. Yet, as the critic Ranjit Hoskote notes, Sharma’s portrayal of the subaltern also involves a degree of admiration. Hoskote believes the artist’s early “pictorial spaces…glowed with the intensity of the purpose towards which their characters were bent, so that labour and play ceased to be opposites and became two aspects of the same epiphanic state” (“Five Studies for a Portrait of Nataraj Sharma” in Nataraj Sharma, Bose Pacia Modern exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

It was in his identification of this moment of epiphany, along with a physical relocation to Baroda, that the artist eventually transcended this particular brand of figuration. On interrogating what these subjects meant to him, Sharma realized that the reason for his portrayal of the subaltern was not a sense of empathy. As one of the privileged few able to live in the buildings they labored to erect, he was far removed from their existence. Rather, the artist came to see that their daily work and the joy they found in its completion was actually a metaphor for his own difficult creative process, playing out in the city in which he lived and worked.

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