SHAILESH B.R.
Notes to Self
12 May 2020 – 12 July 2020
Online Exhibition
at www.vadehraart.com
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of selected works from Shailesh B.R. titled Notes to Self. With this digital presentation, we are pleased to announce a new digital endeavour – VAG FRESH – a series of online exhibitions hosted on our website, through which we will support our younger artists and direct a percentage of proceeds by way of contribution to charities and NGOs who are working towards rehabilitating communities that are suffering due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Part of the proceeds from this exhibition will serve as a contribution to the Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR), as they specifically undertake relief initiatives against COVID-19 to fight hunger and deprivation for marginalized and underprivileged individuals and families.
Shailesh’s visual language has an aura of iconography, with his ritualistic practice of drawing and collage work that invokes, mimetically, the act of forming connections between disparate observations, thoughts, moods, feelings – the internal world – and objects, places, animals, stories, food, landscapes – the outer world. While he strives to represent an immediate reality conjured through contemplation, his bent of mind evolves in a conversational way by scruitinizing the concept of thought in metaphorical, mythological and political terms, and then presenting it as an amalgamation of the monotony of routine activities and its minor but crucial elements in a political context. These preliminary drawings often ideologically serve as blueprints to explore the kinetic and sculptural nature of the imagination.
This exhibition includes an assortment of works from Shailesh’s 2019 series Eclipse, which deals with the phenomenon of existence and the overshadowing of one, caused by the intrusion of a third party that impels the artist to consider his immediate surroundings as well as the world at large, taking the descriptive form of a variety of objects and places – fruit and vegetables, sea and mountains, volcanoes and ant hills, etc. The exhibition also includes work from his most recent solo exhibition The Last Brahmin, which opened in Nice in February 2020, in which Shailesh explores the complicated construction of the Indian caste system and Brahmin ritual in particular. Primarily concerned with the ownership and dissemination of spiritual knowledge, an apparent birthright of the Brahmin caste, Shailesh considers the role of technology and machinery in replacing the human mind and system to answer philosophical questions. The exhibition further includes a latest body of work titled Vasanta the artist is developing in response to the lockdown, while still in Nice, in which the anxiety and unrest from unknowing await answers and clarity in the form of spring.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shailesh B.R. (born 1986) received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, specialising in painting, from the Chamarajendran Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore, and has a postgraduate diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda. His practice revolves around the nature of processes – of philosophical thought, art and rituals, expressed through a visual vocabulary that makes the viewer reimagine the purpose and function of routine objects. His works are playful reconfigurations of philosophical thought through mechanical means. His drawings (which unapologetically reject any grammatical precision) question the staunch formalism associated with art and use the premise of honest artistic wonder instead to explore how errors can be made in how he sees, perceives and defends his ideas.
Shailesh’s solo exhibition Tarka was held at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2017). Shailesh has participated in various group shows, including the CIMA Art Award Show, Kolkata (2014); Drawing 2014: Seven Decades of Indian Drawing, Gallery Espace, Delhi (2014); Student’s Biennale, Kochi 2014, a parallel event to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014; Remembering the Present, Vadehra Art Gallery, New
Delhi (2018); and, Narrow Road to the Interior, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2019).He has been part of the Khoj Peers 2015 as an artist-in-residence and was invited for the Khoj Peers Share in October 2013. In 2014, Shailesh has received the Inlaks Fine Arts Award and was also invited to Sandarbh Art Residency, Partapur, as an artist-in-residence. In 2016, he was awarded the FICA Emerging Artist Award and travelled to Switzerland for a residency. In March 2017, he was invited for the Khoj residency in Goa. Shailesh’s solo exhibition The Last Brahmin will be held at the prestigious Villa Arson in Nice, France from 14 February to 13 May, 2020. The artist lives and works in Vadodara, Gujarat.
