Destination Delhi

Artist Nikhil Bhandari is a busy man these days,putting finishing touches to an installation he has been working on in collaboration with architect Ayush Kasliwal and his team. The work,depicting the Surya Namaskar through 12 asanas,is all set to be unveiled at the T-3 terminal at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. This is not his first work at the newly opened airport though. His previous work is a four-feet high series of hand mudras employed in dance,and cast in fibre glass. “The moulds for the new works are ready and we are just waiting for the GMR committee to approve the material so we can go ahead and cast them,” says the 42-year-old.

Bhandari began his career as a photo-journalist in the nineties,before switching over to public art. “I studied painting and sculpture at Mumbai’s JJ School of Art,but it was only after I suffered a paralytic stroke that I got back to art seriously,” says the Jaipur-based artist who suffered the attack in 1992. “I was bed-ridden till 1997 and my life hit rock bottom. I had a lot of time to think about life and where it was taking me,” he recalls. It was then that his interest and training in art came to his rescue. “Being born in Rajasthan had predisposed me to the arts,but I was sure that I didn’t want to become a miniature painter. My art is definitely inspired by my spiritual and philosophical beliefs as a Jain. But I approach this through the medium of photography and installation,” he concludes.

His latest installation too therefore works on a similar spiritual theme. The artist has worked on sculptures that are over five feet tall— figures of lithe-bodied youths performing the namaskar,and have rendered them in aluminium and anodised in copper. The whole thing has been mounted on a parabolic curve.

After the success of his exhibition at Artchill Gallery in Amber Palace,Jaipur in 2009,Bhandari is now gearing up for his first solo show in Rome next year. He will exhibit another sculpture— this time an interpretation of Gandhiji’s three monkeys. “I am going to add a fourth one to the speak no evil,hear no evil and see no evil trio. It will be called,think no evil,” he says.

The sculptural installations will be an amalgam of earphones,dark glasses,microphones and automobiles. These will be displayed along with his photographs that are images of projections on the human body,“The works will convey the tension between form and colour,” says Bhandari.