suhasini kejriwal

"An Advertisement for heaven or hell"
An exhibition of recent paintings and installations
By
Suhasini Kejriwal
19 Feb - 14 March 2008

In her recent works, Kejriwal has drawn upon the dark yet playful humour that she finds in the work of some of the surrealists.

Unconscious associations and startling juxtapositions that transcend habitual thinking to reveal deeper and alternate levels of meaning emerge in the work. Particularly interested in the quirky, Kejriwal's work often reminds one of the more contemporary stories of British children's writer Roald Dahl. Brains and hearts creep out of the dense jungles that her work inhabits; veins and human arteries appear patterned into the leaves.

At first sight these beautiful works, with their immense sense of colour and density, camouflage the more disturbing view that one begins to read when looking further into the magic of her work. Earlier, Suhasini Kejriwal had worked with photographic images of plants and flowers, picturing them on canvas and paper not so much with a view to their direct representation, or even to their clear legibility and comprehension, but by an emphatic and all-present deployment of a continuous, gentle filigree line. In focusing on the structure and presence of the line in her imagery, Kejriwal steered viewers away from perceiving her canvases as photo realist or even photographic. Instead, the swirling dynamism of her line recalled and emulated the traditional South Asian mehndhi patterning used for decorating hands and feet in celebrations and festivals.

Continuing from earlier bodies of work, Kejriwal's paintings in this exhibition engage painstaking detail. In their intricate making, Kejriwal's works refer to the codified and
time-honed nature of the patterning that is inscribed in them rather than a contemporary rehearsal of the gestures of expressionism. The detail, persistence and sheer mass of her line suggests a hyperbolic intensity which lies behind the decorative traditions which Kejriwal gives an image to: that of the flowers which we often take to be the archetypes of pattern, symbol, decoration, emotive affect, and beauty.

Kejriwal earned a BFA from the Parsons School of Design, New York in 1998. She went on to earn a diploma and a masters degree from Goldsmith College in London. Returning to her masters course after a five-year hiatus, and at a time when she was beginning to have widespread visibility in the Indian and international art world, enabled her to approach her masters program with a mature critical distance; because of this also, the rigor and discipline of reengaging with art school significantly strengthened her practice.

Through the experience of being a foreign student in England in 1998-99 and 2005-6, Kejriwal increasingly turned back to her home city of Calcutta for inspiration (especially the local crafts). At that time, Kejriwal began to work with local embroiderers to replicate parts of her paintings in intricate embroidery, which she in turn, would then collage and interpolate within her own drawings. Variant textures began to take form in her paintings and sculptures in her time there.

Kejriwal has participated in solo exhibitions at Chitrakoot Gallery, Calcutta (1998), Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore (2002), Gallery Ske, Bangalore (2004), and Nature Morte, New Delhi (2005; 2007)

In 2008 she was invited to participate in "Best of Discoveries" - a special section in ShContemporary, curated by Deeksha Nath.