Sanjoy Ghosh puts his artwork on bottles of wine, but his canvases are not just about heady vintages You didn’t necessarily have to be tipsy to see Picasso on a bottle of wine. You just had to be lucky. Chateau Mouton Rothschild had Picasso, Dali, Warhol and a host of artists design the labels of each year’s vintage — the label outside as exhilarating as the fine Bordeaux within. But connoisseurs of Indian wines never had it so rich — until now. When Manesar-based Vin Opera launches, in a few months, its wine labels Rosso di Montalcino, Brunello di Montalcino, Barbera Piemonte and Amarone della di Valpolicella under its Italian range, the bottle labels will have, arguably for the first time, works by an Indian artist — Kolkata-based Sanjoy Ghosh. Ghosh’s large canvases — a few of which have been subsequently reduced to 4 x 3 inch label format — are on display at the Travancore House. If one has a skeletal figure prancing in a brightly lit house, another has an enlarged face of a woman occupying the skyline of an urban cityscape. “These are the aftereffects of consuming wine,” chuckles Ghosh. The exhibition “The Waiting” is Ghosh’s first solo in Delhi. “The title signifies the long wait before art lovers begin to recognise my work,” sighs the 50-year-old. The brushstrokes are not just about grapes dreaming in oak barrels. They are intimations of mortality. If Nature and Instinct juxtaposes a human skeleton with a pink bud, The Cycle has a skeleton lying on the ground with strings attached to its ribs and The Quest has two of these figures reaching out to each other.(The show ends today)
