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Lot 41

 

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The duo of Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra dabble in both fine and commercial art, design, production and application. Their collaborative work extends over a wide range of genres and media including painting, sculpture, installation, video art, music, graphic design, product design and interior design, and addresses several issues facing the growing urban population of India.

"The production of Thukral & Tagra [as they have branded... The duo of Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra dabble in both fine and commercial art, design, production and application. Their collaborative work extends over a wide range of genres and media including painting, sculpture, installation, video art, music, graphic design, product design and interior design, and addresses several issues facing the growing urban population of India.

"The production of Thukral & Tagra [as they have branded themselves] strives for a rootless cosmopolitanism, an instigation to infect all manner of communication with an unexpected sparkle, in the process making life more marvelous. This strategy, inherently democratic, allows for both the most rarified of products (the unique painting) to co-exist with the most humble (stickers and buttons given away for free). Commodification is piously acknowledged and then made into a mockery of itself ("I Shop Therefore I Am.")" (Peter Nagy, "The Alluring Snare of Deceptive Scenographies", Thukral & Tagra, Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Bose Pacia, New York, 2008, p. 9).

In the present lot, a large-format canvas painted in their unique style that has been described as 'Punjabi baroque', the artists take a disrespectful swipe at the almost fetishistic consumerism of modern, urban Indians. The fact that advertising, logos and brand names now supersede other factors (in this case, including health warnings) in value assessments when it comes to consumption of goods may be portrayed in an amusing light by the duo, but an underlying sense of disturbance is unmistakable. One of the subversive pot-shots that the artist have taken in the face of these developments has involved the creation and marketing of an entire range of fake products, like the ones painted on this canvas, under the brand name Bosedk, their Anglicisation of one of the most vulgar Punjabi swear words. Slickly executed, their works drip with irony, illuminating the "the cult of consumption, the hollow yet seductive coercions of advertising and the blinkered aspirations of Punjabi youth who want nothing more than to flee the country" (Shruti Ravindran, "Beaux Mundas", Outlook, November, 2008).

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