Size doesn't matter

(Who says you need to be working with a newspaper to write for it? I wrote this for the paper I was with before I decided to go on sabbatical, and it was published a little while ago. I was going to delete it, but then I kinda liked it...)

For an audience, Indian art tends to have no format. It is truly free expression, with so many styles and formats that the average critic would be hard-pressed to find words to describe it, briefly and completely. From traditional realistic art to the more modern abstract works of today, from the tiny miniature paintings of the north to the massive installations of contemporary artists, there has been no real unifying thread and no particular trend that can be easily identified. However, with the growing international popularity of new Indian art and ever-increasing exposure to global ideas, many artists in this country have been experimenting with scale, line, form and, of course, style.

And with the growing need to explore and a new freedom that comes from spiraling market prices and a surety of finding a buyer, comes a new way of thinking: BIG. There is space to dream and an awareness that somewhere someone will want to acquire the work, and artists spread themselves, fairly thick on the ground. Consider Jitish Kallat, for one, whose works are self-confessedly ‘monumental. A few months ago he revealed Aquasaurus, a seven-metre-long water tanker made of the same kind of bones that he used for his Autosaurus. It was awe-inspiring in its scale, living up to Kallat’s reputation for enormous works (Artist Making a Local Call, Public Notice II, 365 Lives) created with contemporary issues, social comment and a dash of humour in the thought process behind it. The viewer has options – to try and find perspective from outside the piece, or to stand within it and explore its various aspects.

There have been many others, old and new. Many years ago, MF Husain painted his cavorting horses for a wall of a research institute in Mumbai. Ravinder Reddy’s big-eyed heads take up plenty of room in various corporate houses, while Navjot Altaf’s very large flame-orange sculptures can displace a good-sized truck. Pakistan-based Rashid Rana, who showed at Chemould Prescott Road some months ago, covered huge expanses with his digital print composites – Offshore Accounts, for instance, spread across two walls, angled together. Reena Saini’s Walls of the Womb at Galerie Mirchandani & Steinreucke occupied an entire room, the work spanning the walls, the floor and a verriere.

But even with this immense scale of creative inspiration, artists do rein themselves in, committing to another set of boundaries that, in their own way, test their skills. Ironically, many of those who now need whole galleries to show off their creative talents, have – and still do, on occasion – limited themselves to more practicable spaces. For instance, Kallat has taken part in the Miniature Format Show (Sans Tache gallery), as have many others. From one extreme to another?