MUMBAI.- Chemould Prescott Road announces its exhibition by Anant Joshi titled Masquerade and other Apologues, which runs through February 14, 2015.
As part of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, ‘Masquerade and Apologue’ a solo exhibition of Anant Joshi began at Chemould Prescott Road on 15 January to 14 February 2015
Anant Joshi (1969) is an artist based between Baroda and Bombay; he is an alumni of the Sir JJ School of Art where he studied painting. Between 2002 and 2004 he lived in the Netherlands as a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and then the ‘Prix de Rome award and research residency. Joshi had his first solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould in 1999 and has been showing with the gallery ever since. In 2007, after the gallery moved to its new premises at Prescott Road, an ambitious exhibition: Navel one and the many, asserted his presence in the city, after his return from the two-year residency in Amsterdam. Masquerade and Apologue is Anant Joshi’s third solo with the gallery.
Joshi maintains an affinity to toys, cartoons and satire, using perspectives he learnt as painter to critique the failures of contemporary culture and politics. As an artist he often revisits toy making, art histories of cartoons, temple architecture, dioramas or bronze casting to create vocabulary of satire and visual critique.
He orchestrates ‘Masquerade and Apologue’ at Chemould Prescott Road by a lead up of paintings placed as a comic strip in a solo show where he revisits the role of humour and historical space where cartoons have contained dissent. Toying with toys, blow torching them to form broadsheets on a weathervane that mocks the aesthetics of yellow journalism and its tryst with popular and political culture. He constructs images with toys based on a vast archive of images he collects from newsfeed, abstracting them by using ‘Ben-Day dots’ that are carved onto the canvas and colours that contrast violently which do not allow easy access to their content. (Ben-day-dots obscure perspective to create visions of colour that reduce cost of printing; Roy Lichenstien, well-known American Pop artist from the 60s used this techinique in his comic-strip paintings.)
How does the artist negotiate life in a city that is the constituency of a politician who has led a cavalry charge towards political success using social media and aligned corporate media interests as his war-horses? Joshi entertained himself over the changing fortunes of the last government scouring for cartoons that critiqued dynamics of party meetings, to the personal scandals of politicians, and the changing power dynamics within parties. Cartoons have their origins in the preparatory surface of frescos and paintings from the Renaissance, Joshi's egg tempered paper board are changes to cartoons he takes from Kureel, Mika, Shreyas, Surendra, Satish, Keshav and Manjul, erasing their speech balloons and distorting them with watercolour. The watercolours celebrate the authorship of the cartoons and allow artistic freedoms of dissent in form, colour and politics.
His notable participations in exhibitions have been Aesthetic Bind: Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer ,Chemould Prescott Road (2014) curated by Geeta Kapur, Kochi Muziris Biennale (2012), Project Cinema City: Research Art & Documentary Practices, Bombay /,Delhi,/ Banglore (2012) curated by Dr. Madhushree Dutta, Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art - Essl Museum , Wien / Mori Art Museum Tokyo 2009/2008; Indian Highway , Muse De L’Art Contemporaine , Lyon/ Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo 2011/ 2009 ; West Heavens:Place-Time-Play.Curated by Chaitanya Sambrani ,Shanghai (2010) ; Indian Summer curated by Deepak Anand, 'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris (2005) , Prix De Rome’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2004),
