ART-PREVIEW:Jitish Kallat-Phase Transition

Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai where he currently lives, the artist works with a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography and installation. In his art and practice he develops his deep engagement with the city of Mumbai. Among his main topics the artist investigates globalization, urbanization, social and economic.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive

For over 20 years, Jitish Kallat’s wide-ranging and deeply reflective work has drawn an imaginary map connecting the everyday to the cosmic. His solo exhibition “Phase Transition” marks his return to painting after five-year hiatus from the medium. For the past five years, Kallat’s long-standing engagement with the ideas of time, transience, sustenance and the cosmological took the form of large elemental drawings, and investigative animation videos, photo-works and sculptures. As the artist says “My art is more like a researcher’s project who uses quotes rather than an essay, with each painting necessitating a bibliography”. Kallat earned early acclaim as a painter, representing facets of daily life and visual culture in the bustling city of Bombay down to the most minute detail, and conveying the weight of history as well as the energy and ambition that drives this city that inspires his work. The timeless dilemma of the collective versus the individual manifests in Kallat’s work, and leaves viewers with a sense of responsibility to instigate positive change before history repeats itself. The natural elements in these urban works are distorted and disturbing, often evoking a sense of apocalyptic. As his painting career developed, Kallat began to add sculptural elements to the works such as bronze mounts that depict colonial era details from the 120-year-old Victoria Terminus station in the heart of the commercial district of Bombay. Kallat’s work extends far beyond painting, and in recent years, he has been celebrated for the scale of his sculpture, installation, and new media projects both in terms of their size, but also in terms of their research. Nearly seven years later in 2011, Kallat hit a seminal point in his career with a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was here that he created the monumental installation “Public Notice 3”, a text-based work that recontextualized the idea of September 11th in America by recalling Vivekanada’s words and illuminating them on the grand steps of the Museum using the bright colors of US Homeland Security threat level coding. Text has a long history in Kallat’s works, from the painted titles on his early paintings to his more recent installations that often use text as form. At the first Kiev Biennale in 2012, Kallat created another critically acclaimed work entitled “Covering Letter”, a freestanding fog screen projection that revisits a 1939 letter from Gandhi to Hitler, allowing viewers to stand close to words from one of the world’s greatest advocates of peace who addresses Hitler as a “friend” under the ideology of universal friendship. In addition to universal ideals and shedding light upon the plight of the ‘other,’ several of Kallat’s recent works are more personal, and call upon the viewer to find themselves in the work. In a haunting untitled work at Sculpture at Pilane, Sweden from 2010, Kallat created a 30-meter long sculpture of cast resin and steel bones which spell the phrase “When Will You Be Happy” in a historical burial ground in Sweden, putting desires that are often driven by consumerism into the important context of our human mortality. Kallat’s 2011 work “Epilogue” explores the 753 moon cycles that his father experienced in his lifetime by creating photographs of each moon cycle with the moons made of roti (the most basic form of bread in India) in various stages being eaten.

Info: Galerie Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 12/1-9/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com