peter nagy

Publicity for amusement
6 - 30 April

Gallery owner, writer, curator and artist all wrapped into one: Peter Nagy - comes to Mumbai with his first solo show in India at Gallery Chemould.
Part of a pioneering art-scene in New York city, Peter Nagy started Nature Morte in the East village in New York city between 1982 and 1988. He first came to India as a tourist in 1990 and returned as artist-in-residence in 1992 after which he stayed on in India, going back intermittently to the U.S.

In 1997, Peter Nagy started Nature Morte in New Delhi. His presence brought a completely new flavour to the Delhi Art Scene. Peter has worked doggedly since then at first as a more migrant art gallery. Since December 2003 he has firmly rooted himself with a collaboration of Nature Morte with New York's BosePacia Gallery.

Peter's paintings combine graphics and diagrams from a wide variety of sources and cultures - which include architectural plans, maps, archeological schematics, textile and decorative arts motifs, cosmological diagrams, and images from scientific and medical sources. These are collected, collated and combined into puzzles or brain-teasers (hence the title of the exhibition). The works are inspired by the increasing hybridity of all cultures, particularly the pluralistic traditions which have congealed into "Indian Culture" as we like to think of it (or at least some of us), and the possibilities (or lack thereof) for translating visual imagery from one culture to the next or from one discipline to another. The paintings are also like the visual equivalents of "word-search" games in that images are hidden within each other, disguised so as to lose their original identities and uses. Peter's works are not overt critical or political statements, the works are reflections on his own personal experiences, aesthetic preferences and view of the world.