Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | March 2008

130 103 Rekha Rodwittya (b.1958) Naika Signed on verso ‘Rodwittya 2001’ On verso ‘NAYIKA’ Rodwittya 2001Acrylic +Oil on canvas (Silk Screen - Facilitator Mukesh Bhatt, Bikash Pawar Cinema Still Reference ASIAN SITARA/ THE STAR OF ASIA 1932 SILENT SURYA FILM Co. ACTOR’ MISS JENA) Mixed media on canvas, 2001 71.5 x 46.8 in (179.0 x 119.0 cm) INR 1,200,000 – 1,600,000 USD 30,000 – 40,000 104 Surendran Nair (b.1956) Visarjan S/d & titled in English on Verso Oil and Sand on canvas, 1990 30.0 x 23.6 in (76.0 x 60.0 cm) INR 640,000 – 800,000 USD 16,000 – 20,000 105 Vasudha Thozhur (b.1956) Signs in the sky S/d in English on Verso, ‘Vasudha Thozhur 1991’ Oil on Canvas, 1991 59.0 x 41.8 in (149.9 x 106.2 cm) INR 1,200,000 – 1,600,000 USD 30,000 – 40,000 106 Vasudha Thozhur (b.1956) Variations on a theme: Santosh Signed in English on Verso Oil on canvas (polytych) (4 PANELS), 2004 84.0 x 141.0 in (213.4 x 358.1 cm) INR 2,000,000 – 2,400,000 USD 50,000 – 60,000 Image illustrated in Rekha Rodwittiya Bye Bye Baby Sakshi Gallery ExC 2003. ‘Her iconic compositions of single, frontal figures invoke the use of art for devotion. Her themes of women in exquisite natural and interior settings and her use of colour for emotive expression recall, and sometimes quote, works from the great Rajput tradition. More fundamentally, the paintings ascribe to that aim of ancient classical art: the capacity to invoke and thereby unite distinct aesthetic experience in their flow of rasa.’ – Karen Miller Lewis rpt. in Rekha Rodwittiya Bye Bye Baby Sakshi Gallery ExC 2003. “Surendran’s context is his country and its protean facility for the evolved religious images. What he does is to exploit this avidity for invention for entirely subversive ends. He fastidiously picks at the icon even as he decontextualizes it, and renders it as both fixed and changeable paradigm in his field of play. Surendran’s language plays upon the religious and the popular icon. Liberally sprinkled with visual and literary puns the icon becomes a surrealist object of fancy, which can pleasure or maim the body, or render it a field for the enactment of puns…Between the known and the new, Nair posits a tantalizing and provocative argument through an extraordinarily developed lexicon of images.” Gayatri Sinha, rpt. in Combine—Voices for the New Century NGMA ExC.2000. ‘Vibrant surfaces and rhythms of line and paint enclose a profusion of imagery and colour in a fast- paced visual jazz stretching the limits of credibility. Many of the images have interchangeable parts. Puns and paradoxes abound. So do fragmentation, truncation and traces of narratives begun but left unfinished. One’s interpretative powers are put to the test, not to speak of the assimilative ones…. There are times though when her sense of riotous colour overwhelms her sense of riotous scene. It’s a colour which desperately vies with imagery as it blazes with sherbet yellows, electric blues, acid greens, shocking pinks and high frequency turquoises and reds…The large panels remind one of theatrical tableaux, set in shallow space – where nothing operated according to plan. A snarling tiger/cat nurses a litter of rats, parts of the human body lie pickled in jars of formaldehyde, a fat little bald angel clutching a long range missile, malevolent beasts glare at the viewer balefully…’ – Kamala Kapoor, rpt. in The Economic Times 7 January 1992.