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The Guild Art Gallery
is pleased to present With a Pinch of Salt, by K P Reji
from July 3rd, 2009 to July 18th, 2009 at The Guild.
“It’s a
delight to find paintings in the common and everyday...”
K.P. Reji
The present body of works by
Baroda based artist K. P. Reji are a continuation of his
explorations into the organization of community life in India and
the manner in which this has become a political issue in
contemporary India. However, what makes the present set of works
distinct from some of his more recent works on community is the
way he has pushed the conceptual thresholds of his visual language
in order to probe further into the areas of community life in
India, particularly the ways in which the Indian nation state has
arranged the lives of its people. He focuses on the way the nation
state has set up a seemingly coherent bio political order for its
own legitimacy as a sovereign power. The sites where Reji has
chosen to work for the mapping of the ‘national’ and ‘modern’ in
India are of course the paradigmatic sites of the family and the
state, the domains of the private and the public. What one sees
across these set of works is a collapsing of these seemingly
separate spheres of life with their distinctions becoming
historically irrelevant in the face of an emerging biopolitical
order in India. Reji’s works map this order of life and the ways
in which the lives of various communities are imagined in it.
Reji’s representations of this new order are structured around an
incisive examination of the category family. The family, as it
emerges in this body of work, is caught in the interstices of
nation and capital. Rendered at moments of the intensely
personal—during sleep, at play, setting up a house or making
love—the family nevertheless is shown relentlessly tied to
governmental forces that shape its very contours. There is a
sustained hint in these dramatic, even melodramatic depictions,
that these figures are hardly individuated, in fact, they call to
mind populations and demographics, the subjects of a national
order.
Born in Kerala, K.P. Reji has done his graduation and
post-graduation in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.
University of Baroda. He has had three solo exhibitions with ‘Just
Above My Head’ being the latest, held in The Guild Art Gallery,
Mumbai in 2006. He has widely participated in many significant
group exhibitions, camps and workshops in India and abroad,
including the Shanghai Art Fair (2008), Miami Art Fair (2008),
Miart 2008 in Milano, ‘OK Horn Please’ curated by Suman Gopinath
at Bern Museum, Switzerland (2007), ‘Beyond Credos’ curated by
Shivaji K. Panikkar at Birla Academy, Kolkata (2007), ‘Double
Enders’ a travelling exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari
(2005-6), ‘Are We Like This Only’ curated by Vidya Shivadas at
Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2005) among many others. He has
recently been the recipient of the Sanskriti Award for the Young
Artist by the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi in 2007. He lives
and works in Baroda.
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