Jitish Kallat (b.1974)

Acquired from Haunch of Venison, London

Jitish Kallat's work examines the double-edged nature of globalisation, and how it impacts the daily grind of the urban poor living in India's most populous city, Mumbai. Highlighting issues of the rapid development and its social and economic implications, he focuses on the existence of the rural migrant, to whom urbanisation offers hope but also exploitation. Kallat's canvases depict the overcrowded and haphazard development that characterises Mumbai, where people, cars and buildings are constantly converging against a multi-layered backdrop of dearth, paucity, social inequality and corruption. His art is a representation of this strata of society, rendered in large-scale formats so that the sheer size of his canvases elevate their marginalised status. He portrays Mumbai as a city of many layers, not only socio-economic but also histo-political.

"Even if my early works were heavily autobiographical, the overcrowded and media saturated street festooned with billboards, provided me with my themes as well as my artistic language." (the artist quoted in Reality Filters in Jitish Kallat 365 Lives, Arario Gallery, Beijing, 2007, p.24).

In this painting, Kallat fragments the image by utilizing diverse painting styles. The hair is painted in monochrome and in high contrast, such that it looks like images one could encounter in newspapers. This serves as a comment on the globalized world, where photographs are mass produced and reduced to pixelated images. On the other hand, the man’s shirt is colourful and depicted in a painterly style with defined shadows, similar to those in comic books. Kallat takes advantage of his artistic liberty in the composition of the hair, which narrates Bombay’s stream of consciousness. Outlined in black paint are animals, people, vehicles and buildings compressed and piled above each other, concentrated in the space of the hair. These arbitrary elements that one could find in any street in Bombay share a single flow, as the hair of people in the foreground blend with the hair of those in the background, flattening the painting overall. In this way, Kallat expresses the uniformity between human beings: though their minds are in different places and their heads turn in erratic directions, these strangers share an urban environment that follows them in their daily life.

The monumental size of the painting conjures images of billboards and the painting format echoes the idea of graffiti, an implementation of Pop Art. This painting captures the urban lifestyle and the dialogue between individual and collective experiences in Bombay’s expansive metropolis. One of India’s leading contemporary artists, Jitish Kallat received his BFA in painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1996 and was bestowed the “Young Achiever Award” in 2001. Most recently, he curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala.