MUMBAI.- Tanujaa Rane is a printmaker who has been working in the medium of etching for over twenty years.
She has within her studio, a printing machine, which restricts the size of paper that Tanjuaa is able to use. But she is able to overcome this restriction that the printing-machine or paper allows by creating and spreading her work over several frames, making for exceedingly large format work by creating grid like structures wherein the image flows from one paper on to the other. The scale of imagery that the artist achieves, thus displaces the fragility of subject and the delicacy of line.
Images of routine life, from objects to insects that are part of the everyday, form the imagery in Tanujaa's work. Personal stories are transformed into metaphorical images. Quite often, in trying to stretch or expand a form into a bigger format Tanujaa begins to treat her etching almost like a painting, using colour intaglios, which fill the spaces within the expanse of the line.
Tanujaa returns with a solo show at
Chemould Prescott Road after 2008 with a painterly precision and mastery over the mediums of etching, colour intaglio and cyanotype. Veeranganakumari Solanki in her curatorial says, “Light streams across Tanujaa Rane’s work… From the etched lines behind the Moth and the Monarch butterfly in Transfiguration/ Metamorphosis, rays extend into the flight paths of one hundred Cicadas and to the Damsel Fly Long, which gravitates towards the recognisable abstract phases of an illuminated moon. Animals, a recurring motif in Rane’s early works, act as metaphors and reflections of life. Carrying forward into Rane’s current exhibition, we observe an emerging lightness as the creatures move from land to air to mythical realms. The artist deconstructs familiar forms to compel viewers’ awareness of how they see. The back-and-forth movement, while trying to piece together a jigsaw, draws attention to the infinite abstract and complex details of insect bodies and wings.”
Shireen Gandhy, the creative director at Chemould Prescott Road says, “Tanujaa works with instinct - her references are around her - sometimes sitting on her paper, following her… the moth who never leaves the studio or keeps returning to watch her work, that finally becomes the work! Laboured and rigourous, Tanujaa is one of the leading practitioners of her medium - etching. Her mastery over it so complete that the joy of listening to her animated tales about process is worth every story!”
Veerangana continues to talk about the work in the show. “Twenty-One Days, a series of twenty-one prints, signifies an important time frame or number for Rane. Acting as a transitory prism for the exhibition, this work seeds from the artist’s ongoing journey with Reiki, healing and meditation, while also celebrating the struggle of thought processes, attachment and detachment. She identifies this number, twenty-one, as her never-ending cycle for change and experience. The spinal cord that centres this work also extends as a metaphor for a base that bonds and breaks light, systems, pain, form, the body and abstraction. Recognising the comfort in creative discomfort, it is also after a period of twenty-one years of printmaking that Rane has introduced sculpture and cyanotypes into her practice.
Mystical Unicorn Connections is the artist’s interpretation of antennas that emerge from every manmade surface she encountered during the pandemic, including TV towers as well as cranes and scaffoldings on construction sites. A collection of conical wall and floor lacquered-fibreglass sculptures stand in clusters to represent human connections while also suggesting the acceptance of a loss (of control) as magical. The defining blue and white lines of the unicorn horns spiral into experiments with light on a wall of cyanotypes, where the unknown becomes an accepted outcome, and the exit becomes the opening for the presence and dispersal of light.”
A Sir J J School of Art Alumni, Tanujaa completed her BFA in Drawing & Painting followed by MFA in Printmaking. Her solo exhibitions include 1999: Prints, Chitra Kala Parishad, Bangalore, 2002: Recent Works at Glasgow Print Studio Gallery – III, Glasgow and 2008: Me- Mom, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai.
In 2005, Tanujaa was felicitated with H.K. Kejriwal Young Artist Award. In 2010, she executed an etching commissioned by Indian Govt. at Domestic Airport, Mumbai followed by an art project – an installation of large etchings at the bus lounge area of T2 East, Mumbai, International Airport, curated by RSS and commissioned by GVK in 2014.
