Reimagining the object: Ritesh Meshram and Tallur LN | In-Touch Edition VI

Something curious happens when an ordinary object from everyday life enters Ritesh’s studio. Attempting to refashion familiar objects, he transforms their shape and function as he combines, bends, twists, crushes and detaches, to gives them a new life as a work of art. He begins by collecting utensils, surgical tools, and domestic items, and takes them apart, piece by piece. By surrendering to the chance twists and curves of metal, he plays, and manipulates, to the extent they are unrecognizable. Through spontaneous combinations of small, independent parts, rather than a premeditated composition, he reassembles them into a newly imagined figure. What he achieves is fragility and lightness, a soft delicacy with metal - as he investigates what happens when the mundane is remade in a surprising scale or form.

Through his recreation of commercial antiques and statues, Tallur similarly interrogates familiar imagery. He challenges different metals and their conceptual limits, as he mimics portions of statues and morphs the rest with other materials. Dramatic, textural, and organic in appearance, his hybrid figures boldly contrast their industrial origin; identical, mass produced statues, now possess a new, distinct beauty. His dynamic titles- usually amusing and without spacing- are as curious as the sculptures themselves.

In their works in this exhibition, Ritesh and Tallur engage in a careful dialogue with metals and found objects, investigating and responding to each material’s qualities. For the first time Ritesh works with such a limited scale; introducing entirely new shapes into his sculptural vocabulary. Tallur playfully explores complementary opposites - handmade vs machine-made, discovering a new potential for metal. Both artists have sought inspiration from found materials and everyday life.

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