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

79 the time, the works of many of these artists have undercurrents of guilt, communicated through the choice of their subjects. These artists used “distancing” as a strategic tool for investigating “the alienated”. However, the struggles of the ordinary in these definitive space-structures, amidst a complex nexus of social relations, remain the subject matter for many other artists. In A. Ramachandran’s works, the loathsome flesh inhabiting structured spaces is a metaphorical articulation of the stretched bodies / masses caught up in the built spaces. Most of the figures in his works produced during this time don’t have heads. The city is a land of action and not thinking. The stretched bodies are portraits of the doers / the city dwellers. Bikash Bhattacharjee’s images of a decaying city are reflected through his surreal imagery and the suffocating binds of the city. The works of three contemporaries – Atul Dodiya, Nataraj Sharma and Baiju Parthan – are emblematic of the different directions that the genre has taken. In Atul Dodiya’s ‘Roadside with Temple’, the local shrine against the textured wall is tactically cornered to left, while the rest of the space is desolate. Shrines and Gods remain an important aspect of Dodiya’s work as religion is crucial to the values and aesthetics of the middle- class environment. Using a photo-realist style, Dodiya achieves a stasis in the work, creating the expectation of a visitor or somebody having just visited. These annotations of small town architecture in his later works evolve into popular culture assemblages. Nataraj Sharma adds machines in the landscape as human substitutes, introducing a mechanistic imaginary. His large canvases are dotted with factories, junk iron nuts and bolts – which have become an important aspect of the industrial urban. Baiju Parthan’s ‘Sun Rising – Patented Landscape’ enters into the territorial angst created by the guarded national borders, that on one level become the contours defining the shape of the land / nation, and double up as markers of material differences. The pun in the phrase ‘Patented Landscape’ cannot be missed as the angels quietly digress from the norms of the mortal world.