黑料不打烊

鈥淢y paintings remind me why I remember something while looking at something else. My works contain the experience of looking. The curiosity of looking at a person, a person in a particular condition. Existences mingle; the animals, the trees, and objects in my paintings may tell human stories.鈥濃�擬ahesh Baliga

David Zwirner is pleased to present Drawn to remember, an exhibition of new paintings by Indian artist Mahesh Baliga, on view in The Upper Room at the gallery鈥檚 London location. This will be Baliga鈥檚 first solo exhibition outside of India. 

Baliga documents the intricacies of life in western India, instilling quotidian and often overlooked moments with emotional resonance. Fascinated by the relationship between a painting鈥檚 formal construction and its psychological effect, the artist slips seamlessly between the real and the imagined, developing surreal visual interventions that convey the poignant and strange nature of memories, personal loss, and the passage of time.

Using casein tempera, Baliga deftly synthesizes Eastern and Western influences, combining the vivid palettes of postimpressionist Pierre Bonnard with a visual abundance that recalls Persian miniature painting. The artist populates his canvases with a recurring reel of characters and settings: the verdant surroundings of his outdoor painting studio, the ink-stained shirt of a poet, the artist鈥檚 late mother with her hands pressed together in prayer. These diverse and seemingly unrelated images coalesce into a 鈥減rivate hieroglyphic landscape,鈥� hinting at the existence of a larger chronology that is both tantalizingly familiar yet obdurately enigmatic. As writer and curator Aveek Sen described, to grasp Baliga鈥檚 compositions is 鈥渓ike learning to read auto-fiction鈥攏either fully autobiography nor fully fiction鈥攎ade by a generous but subtle and elusive writer for whom the reinvention of characters and situations, the retelling of dreams and myths, and allusion to other artists and their work were constitutive of the mystery, veracity and labour inherent in the actual making of images.鈥�