Life in Miniature

Works of British artist Alexander Gorlizki,who has been working with Indian miniature paintings for 16 years,are on display in India for the first time.

Written by Sankhayan Ghosh

October 10, 2012 02:59 AM IST

4 min read

Works of British artist Alexander Gorlizki,who has been working with Indian miniature paintings for 16 years,are on display in India for the first time.

Alexander Gorlizki,prefers to dwell in ambiguity. He calls his work a collection of riddles and thinks of himself as a messy head that visualises pictures to their intricate extreme but doesnt execute them entirely. Gorlizki works on the iconography,compositions,colour schemes and patterns to draw the creative outline,but hands over the inner detailing to Jaipur-based miniature artist Riyaz Uddin. The paintings shuttle between Jaipur and New York,as they undergo coats of intricate layers,sometimes taking even more than a year to complete. The peculiar set up of Gorlizkis works has been going on for the last 16 years,ever since he discovered the unparalleled craftsmanship the miniature painters of the region possess.

With this,Gorlizki found a mode to channelise his West-bred independent voice through an Indian form of painting he had fallen in love with ever since his first visit to the subcontinent 30 years ago. My eyes are always buzzing in India. Sometimes the influences might be other art forms such as sign-painting or tile work in a mosque,but it could also be a sari border design or the patterns on a lungi, says the British artist,whose collective set of works,titled We Like It Here,Were Not Moving,is being shown at the Amrita Jhaveri Project in Walkeshwar Road,Mumbai. Despite his strong creative relationship with India and his multiple previous visits,this is the first time Gorlizkis works are being showcased through an exhibition in the country. The exhibition is on till October 26.

Gorlizkis first exposure to miniature paintings was through his mother,an antique shop owner,with whom he spent his formative years trotting across Central and South Asia. There is something liberating about the visual intensity of an object that isnt specifically made to be art. Even a toolbox from Nuristan will be decorated with beautiful ornate carving its quite different from what Id find at Home Depot, he says.

He keeps trying to infuse these skills into his visual language by way of collaboration,sometimes with a shoemaker (with whom he created a formal shoe that split at front into two) and sometimes a spectacle repairman (who created glasses for three pairs of eyes for him). Similarly,his paintings seek to employ the fine brush strokes of delicate intricacy,a rare ability that he thinks artists of northern India possess.

The skills practiced in Rajasthan in some cases yield amazing abilities,but there is very little originality or invention of new forms. The painters make copies of traditional paintings for the tourist market. There is very little need for invention or originality in this. But on the other hand,the practice makes the skill extraordinary and you can clearly see the level of skill by comparing it to earlier references, explains the 45-year-old artist,who is based in New York.

Gorlizki,therefore,constantly subverts the traditional form by bringing in his own influences tartan knitwear,40s American advertisements,Japanese ceramics and so on. In one of his works,titled We Can Get Through This Together,a kissing couple based on the leading actors of the Jean-Luc Goddard film,Breathless,look out of a Mughal window at a bizarre imagery of Indian mythology and pop culture.

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