n s harsha

N. S. HARSHA
Charming Nation
Paintings
8 Dec, 2006 - 6 Jan, 2007

Mysore based artist N. S. Harsha's latest suite of paintings, offer his witty and poetic, political and social responses to a variety of issues relating to contemporary global life in small town & city India. Made between 2004-2006, the figurative and narrative paintings are woven out of the artist's personal travel experiences and photographs and images culled from the media. Like a chronicler, he often draws from popular stories and local perceptions of international news events. He juxtaposes seemingly disassociated images of scenes of small town and village India with those of more recognizably international ones. Harsha's multi-layered narratives strongly suggest that the global is always already located within the local imagination.

"The paintings are the outcome of repeated exposure to foreign lands," writes Grant Watson, "interspersed with being back home, so that home and abroad come into a more pronounced juxtaposition. Everywhere change occurs, in a million tiny adjustments through which the flow of new ideas, new images, new products and new technologies are assimilated. Harsha records these processes as they are played out in the lives of ordinary people; the shifts in material culture that transform the everyday, but which people are often able to absorb and normalise with remarkable rapidity. The artist presents aspects of Indian national life, its peculiarities, its intractable problems, its strange conjunctions and its comedy like a series of instructive scenarios, lessons that must be understood and dealt with by the next generation of Indians - the children who are marked as such by the halos which are painted round their heads. Each painting functions like a theatrical tableau with actors, props, scenery and backdrop, or rather, like the elements in model boxes of the kind that theatre designers use to simulate the stage on a miniature scale."

N. S. Harsha was born in 1969. He completed his BFA in painting from CAVA, Mysore, in 1992, and his MFA, also in painting, from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University, Baroda, 1995. He received the Sanskriti Award in 2003 and Vasudev Arnawaz Award in 1992.

Charming Nation was previewed in Bangalore, at the Max Mueller Bhavan from 27 to 29 November, 2006.