Tanya Goel, Mechanisms 1, 2019, Mixed Media, 213 x 274 cm
Courtesy of Nature Morte
The art gallery Nature Morte inaugurated its first exhibition in New Delhi in November 1997 and since then has become synonymous with the highest levels of South Asian contemporary art. The gallery’s program and representation of many of the most important artists of the region to come of age in the past two decades means it has acquired significant stature. Nature Morte represents many of the most prominent names in the South Asian art scene today while continuing to give opportunities to emerging talents.
A fixture of New York’s East Village from 1982 to 1988, Nature Morte was revived in New Delhi in 1997, at the dawn of the globalisation of the contemporary art world. Led by Peter Nagy and Aparajita Jain, the gallery is focused towards exhibiting and promoting art that is pertinent to South Asia but can also speak to a global audience, presenting exhibitions that subsequently gain recognition from curators, collectors, and the general public. In January 2018, Nature Morte showcased a new body of work by the photographer Gauri Gill and the entire exhibition was presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 branch in New York three months later. The very same year, its artists showcased works at prestigious venues such as the Frieze Sculpture Park (London), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Asia-Pacific Triennial (Brisbane), La Monnaie de Paris (France), among other international venues. In 2019, Nature Morte’s artists have mounted solo exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (Thukral & Tagra), Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey (LN Tallur), the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (Seher Shah), and the Met Breuer, New York (Mrinalini Mukherjee). Over two decades, Nature Morte has identified and worked with a generation of artists from the sub-continent who have risen to international acclaim including Bharti Kher, Imran Qureshi, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Mithu Sen, Dayanita Singh, and Raqs Media Collective.
The gallery has been located in its multi-level space in Neeti Bagh, central south Delhi, since December 2003. In addition, the gallery has maintained multiple branches in various locations: Berlin (2008-2014), Calcutta (2006-2009), and the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon (2011-2014). Nature Morte was the first gallery from India to be included in the most important international art fairs (starting with The Armory Show in New York in 2005) and has participated in Art Basel, Fiac Paris, Art Basel Miami Beach, Paris Photo, Art Dubai, Tokyo Art Fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Frieze New York, among others. Nature Morte has also organized projects and exhibitions with international artists coming to India and combining their works with those of Indian artists to foster crosscultural communications. In addition to its own programming, Nature Morte has collaborated with institutions in India such as the British Council, the Alliance Francais, the Sanskriti Foundation, the India International Centre, the India Habitat Centre, Max Mueller Bhavan, the Italian Cultural Center, Khoj International
Aditya Pande
Anita Dube
Asim Waqif
Benitha Perciyal
Bharat Sikka
Bharti Kher
Gauri Gill
Imran Qureshi
Jitish Kallat
L.N. Tallur
Manisha Parekh
Martand Khosla
Mithu Sen
Mona Rai
Mrinalini Mukherjee
Pushamala N
Rajorshi Ghosh
Ramakrishna Behera
Raqs Media Collective N/A
Ray Meeker
Reena Saini Kallat
Saravanan P
Seher Shah
Sheba Chhachhi
Subodh Gupta
Suhasini Kejriwal
Tanya Goel
Thukral and Tagra
Viswanadhan
Zimbiri
Tanya Goel’s works are notable for their exploration of a rigorous abstraction that is deeply invested in the process of their creation. The artist makes her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite and foils, many sourced from sites of architectural demolitions in and around New Delhi. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, which is a direct result of how they reflect light. Her compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos. Goel’s paintings can also be read as linguistic systems, as meaning is constructed only through laborious repetition.
The artist is interested in the idea of the Screen, which painting has always been analogous with. We can trace the Screen through the trajectory of Art History from the flatness of Egyptian art to the simulated three-dimensional space of the Renaissance, back to the flatness of Modernist Abstraction. Goel’s works elaborate a dialogue for painting acknowledging the digital screens in which most of our information and images now reside, exploring both the limitations and the freedoms to be found within this flux. The title of the exhibition refers to this sense of synthetic replication, once seen as anathema to the concept of the Sublime but today very much compatible with it.
Tanya Goel was born in New Delhi in 1985 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before completing her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 2010. She has had one solo show with Nature Morte in New Delhi (2017) and two with Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai (2011 and 2015). Her works are in the collections of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; and the UBS Bank, Zurich. She was a participating artist in both the Sydney and Gwangju Biennales in 2018.
Aparajita Jain, Director
Peter Nagy, Director
A-1, Neeti Bagh,
110049 New Delhi
India
