jitish kallat

Fabricating monumental canvasses imaged in simulation of graffitied billboards and translating reproductions and iconographies sourced in the mass-visual media, Jitish Kallat's crowded textures and mobbed narratives testify to an ever-evolving, saturated urban experience. In an accelerated and prolific decade since his graduation from the J.J. School of Art, Kallat has developed a signature style (stamped with dated 'copyrights') executed variably in mixed-media paintings, photography, and sculptural installations. His work collectively narrates an unfiltered, roughly-hewn dialectic between individual and universal experiences in Mumbai, where he lives and works.

Kallat held his first solo exhibition, "P.T.O.," at Gallery Chemould in 1997, less than a year after his art school graduation. Drawing on elements of autobiography especially in initial exhibitions like "Apostrophe" in New Delhi, 1998, Kallat transformed self-portraiture and distorted pre-existing, recognizable photocopy and newsprint images into large-scale paintings in step with commercial media and the fast, abrasive physicality of changing Mumbai.

"Ibid," a 2001 exhibition at Gallery Chemould, expanded Kallat's visualization of personal, genealogical narrative in mixed media works like Maternamortal (Mom's Mom's Mom and Mom's Dad's Mom) and the experience of everyman in Ode to the Spinal Cord, a layered canvas that locates the local suburban train network as the backbone of Mumbai. By this time also, imprinting titles on his canvasses gave way to involved manipulations of text in select canvasses like Herbs in My Maternal Home, which provides the artist's family biodata. The incorporation of text and verbal narrative into Kallat's painted works complements his frequent, often parallel practice of critical writing on contemporary art.

By the time of his subsequent solo "Milk Route," presented in 2001 by Gallery Chemould in New Delhi, Kallat began to abstract and directly mediate representations of local networks through his international experiences. In twinned exhibitions "The Lie of the Land" and "Humiliation Tax," held in Chicago and at Gallery Chemould in 2004 and 2005, Kallat employed Pop colors and thick, flat lines to comment on the specific, historical event of a speech about tolerance made by Swami Vivekananda on September 11, 1893, and the universal problems besetting impoverished children in India. Rather than artificially resolve the surfaces of his canvasses, Kallat images active mediations on ongoing contemporary struggles and tensions.

In the eponymous series from the exhibition Rickshawpolis, held in New Delhi, Milan, and Sydney between 2005 and 2007, masses of public, private, modern, and traditional vehicles explode from central nodes of the canvasses, flattened into crowded surface silhouettes. Resting the canvasses on paired bronze lions leaping forward from the wall, Kallat transports his paintings into faceted installations. Simultaneous to taking his painting practice into multiple dimensions, Kallat has pursued ambitious, large-scale photography projects like Artist Making Local Call and Onomatopoeia/ (The Scar Park), which envision the urban panorama through public and private perspectives, respectively; where the Artist engages a wide-angled, prism of public streets in suburban Mumbai in the former, his latter Park abstracts close-ups of diversely colorful private vehicles, seaming individual images together with uniform black frames.

Beth Citron