The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present the works of C.K. Rajan, Dia Mehta, Prasad Raghavan and Simrin Mehra Agarwal.  
 
Spy  is curated by Artist Bose Krishnamachari.
 
The politically charged collages by the Kerala-born artist C. K. Rajan, who now lives in Hyderabad are currently  being shown in the Documenta XII at Kassel, Germany. Created in the 1990s out of clippings from mass-circulation Indian newspapers and magazines, they also deal with the disruptions caused by the rapid expansion of Indian cities and the nation's economy. The present suite of works continue the engagement further. 

Dia Mehta, originally from Mumbai, India attended Parsons School of Design in New York City and graduated in May 2006 with a BFA in photography. Prior to enrolling at Parsons, Dia completed a one-year foundation course at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London. During her time at Parsons and St. Martins, Dia has focused extensively on photography, with a particular emphasis on redefining everyday images as commonly interpreted by society.  
 
Prasad Raghavan comes to us from the Advertising World. He has been an Art Director with various Ad agencies and  got into making posters of the cinemas that he was passionately crazy about. Posters were an organic extension of his love for cinema. He did a poster on hitchcock’s birds, for one of his inaugural basement show. It was awarded at the cannes advertising festival and british design and art direction (d&ad). From then onwards, he has been working on movie posters almost every night.
    "I’m more fascinated with the title of the film than the real content of the story. Titles rich in visual meaning like ‘knife in the water’ or ‘thief of baghdad’ let me imagine and interpret the film the way i want to; i let my aesthetic and political voices speak.  I’m not bound by a particular technique, i like breaking personal ground, planting new seeds. I like mixing up  digital photography, charcoal, typography, photocopies and the internet. I am open to many influences as i travel: the swiss dominance of the poster field in the late ‘50s is an inspiring period; the bauhaus roots, the strong typographic elements, the strict graphic, almost mathematical grid, the black-and-white photography – the “international typographic style”. I like what philip meggs calls “conceptual image”, a new language that borrows freely from surrealism,pop art and expressionism."
 
By exploring the relationship between the urban and the biomorphic in her works, Simrin Mehra Agarwal threads together a complex maze of fascinating imagery. She shows the complexities, similarities and disparities within the urban and the biomorphic one being linear and the other being curvilinear. There is a contrast between the organized and the chaotic. The challenge to weave the geometric form of the urban into the fabric of biomorphic is what Simrin  has explored in this series. 

Bose Krishanamachari conceptualises :
"Man has essentially been curious about the lives of others. Sometimes to proect himself, sometimes to survive, sometimes to entertain and sometimes to earn a livelihood. Spying is inherent to man's identity. Man cannot bury the voyeur in him. This is why it reflects in his creative pursuit. He is always returns to the rear window. The SPY show explores this mysterious human characteristic by showcasing by putting together the works of C.K. RAJAN, DIA METHA, PRASAD RAGHAVAN and SIMRIN MEHRA AGARWAL. These works are acts of espionage where, unlike other forms of creativity, the artists access the place where the desired information is stored, or access the people who know the information and divulge it through a sort of subterfuge. This information presented before the eye of the beholder is understandably a mystery which is both revealed and concealed with or without the information of the holder of the secret. Stories that have arrived in the heads of the moles in order to be told. Selections from Palimpsests Yonder."