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Lot 60

 

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All art is intertextual: it borrows from the legacy of art works before itself and simultaneously creates a multiplicity of dialogue with its contemporaries. Following this idiom to the letter are contemporary artists Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, who use an arsenal of artistic traditions in their works, while transgressing any existing boundaries between high and low brow, fine or commercial, intellectual or visceral art. Using complex... All art is intertextual: it borrows from the legacy of art works before itself and simultaneously creates a multiplicity of dialogue with its contemporaries. Following this idiom to the letter are contemporary artists Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra, who use an arsenal of artistic traditions in their works, while transgressing any existing boundaries between high and low brow, fine or commercial, intellectual or visceral art. Using complex variations of graphic design, architecture, animation, fashion, sculpture and a free range of styles in pop, photorealism, surrealism and post-modernism, Thukral & Tagra create works of art that are commentaries on the haemorrhage of consumerism into the social fabric of a culture. "For them the marketplace of commodities is not simply a site of economic exchange but exists as a forum for the contestations of cultural values" (Trevor Smith, Thukral & Tagra, Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Bose Pacia, New York, 2008,, pg. 40).

The present lot is from a series of works titled Somnium Genero, executed from 2005 onwards. In this painting, everyday objects like alarm clocks, bells and cameras are rearranged in an anthropomorphic way giving them the illusion of life, while their symbiosis with flora and fauna seems to suggest that these commodities are fully assimilated into nature and are natural even. In a satirical way, the artists compel the audience to face the excesses of our materialistic lifestyle. Thukral & Tagra's paintings "have presented impressive degrees of diversity, ingenuity and complexity... The duo have a strong penchant for images that float in a deep yet flat space of unmodulated color; juxtaposing trompe l'oeil 3-D with graphic two-dimensionality" ("Neo-Neo- Classicisms", Ibid, pg. 54).

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