Osian's Auction Catalogue Select Masterpieces of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | June 2009

77 35 Shibu Natesan (b.1966) The Wild Heart Oil on canvas, 2002 S/d in English ‘SHIBU NATESAN 2002’ on verso 47.2 x 59.9 in (120.0 x 152.1 cm) Inscribed in English ‘Oil on canvas, The Wild Heart, 48 x 60 inch’ on verso Condition Good, brownish spots on the lower section INR 4,000,000 – 5,000,000 USD 83,330 – 104,170 Exhibition Reference ‘Cinema Still’, Apparao Galleries, New Delhi, 2002 “This painting (Wild Heart) is based on the concept of the film image. Thus the narrative within the image and the sense of frozen movement of a cinema still dominate the way the viewer decodes the layering of the image. The painting was made at the time of the Afghanistan war: oblique reference is made to the conflict through this popular image - guns speak first in lawless country and western movie culture” - Shibu Natesan Natesan’s painting refers to the populist American political imagination that sees its genocidal wars against enemies as having fun killing people. Such attitudes arise from the haloed American pedagogical exercises such as the genre of the American Western film explicitly teaching kids that it’s fun to play ‘let’s gun down some Native Americans’. Ronald Reagan, an actor in Westerns and President of the US in the 1980s, would regularly use popular catch phrases from the Western to ‘inspire’ his people to go to war.