For the Man on the Street

The grunge, the disorder, the contradictions: all too familiar. Suhasini Kejriwal collected these pieces of ‘Eden’, as her show is titled, over a period of four years when she “walked many streets and by-lanes and built a large archive of several thousand photographs and sketches of people, animals, buildings, trees, traffic, rubbish heaps, fruit and vegetable markets.” Out of such an inventory of disconnected images, paintings emerged that recreated the life of the streets
on canvas.

Kejriwal’s large paintings rest on multiple elements. “It is as if all humanity and grunge of the city is right in the viewer’s face,” she says. She traps you in her panoramas of the city that are detailed and complex, such that you could be transported to Eden IV and VI if you merely reached out.

She inspects her subjects up close too, in her smaller paintings. “Here, I have focused on individual stories that explore the psychological and emotional experience of growing up in large urban communities,” she says.

Kejriwal’s Monument is an installation made from fibreglass and acrylic paints. The pyramid “reflects human aspiration from ancient times,” she says. Plastic goods and toys occupy the tip, fruits and vegetables form the middle core, and the bottom rung is littered with waste generated by a consumerist society. “Most of us clearly do not live in ideal conditions. But we are all complicit in the creation of these Edenic habitats,” she says.

The exhibition is on at Nature Morte, Neeti Bagh until April 26.
Contact: 41740215

(The reporter is an EXIMS student)