About the work
Kejriwal, Kolkata-based artist Suhasini Kejriwal creates profoundly imaginative landscapes that draw on detailed observations from her daily life. Kejriwal’s rigorous practice spans painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, investigating the unruliness of urban, jungle and desert environments and the unusual juxtapositions and hybridities that mark everyday visual culture in India today.
Episodically, Kejriwal has returned to the study of natural forms and the creatures that dwell amidst them. In this work, as across her practice, Kejriwal attends to the breadth of psychological, conceptual and even historical relationships underlying individual formal choices. In this series, all the botanicals and leaves are drawn directly from species in her own home garden, a sanctuary during the years of the Covid pandemic while simultaneously a testament to the uncomfortable stillness of the period. Kejriwal performs the role of witness, not only in adherence to what is seen and but also with the commitment to felt experience.
Kejriwal has developed an interest in the transnational history of English gardens, mapping the movement of her own work on to colonial and postcolonial histories across Britain and India. As part of the process of ‘taming’ and overlaying an image of home on to the subcontinent, the British brought botanical species and designs for gardens to India. This has resulted in many hybrid species in urban India today, which Kejriwal comments on through evocative and sometimes psychedelic layers of images in her compositions. These works reject both the implied orientalist exoticism of the subcontinent and the propriety of the manicured English garden.
While earlier versions of Kejriwal’s totemic sculptures featured embroidered surfaces and examined the relationship between hard and soft materials, this series reflects an evolution to hand-painted bronze and a greater scale, the hallmarks of monumental public sculpture. At the same time, Kejriwal’s sculptures defy the figural expectation of totems, showing the enduring power of nature across past and future, the otherworldly and everyday.
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About the artist
Suhasini Kejriwal (b. 1973) lives and works in Kolkata. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design in New York and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, London.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Nature Morte, New Delhi (2005, 2007, 2014, 2020), Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2008), the Anokhi Museum, Jaipur (2009), Galerie Christian Hosp, Berlin (2010) and Gallery SKE, Bangalore (2004). She has also exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and institutions throughout the world.
She completed a fellowship with the collective Hamdasti (2017–2019) that works to facilitate dialogue and collaborations between artists and communities. She was a visiting fellow at the South Asia Institute at Harvard University in 2020.
For more information, please visit the gallery website: Nature Morte
Loaned/from the collection of the RMZ Foundation, India
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