Evocative Objects: Still Life

For centuries, artists have been consumed by the challenge of representing the real world. The genre of still life is a record of this engagement, originally defined as the depiction of inanimate objects to consider their formal qualities.

For nearly two years, we all have experienced the still life – living in a time and space that is surreal, strange, familiar, edgy, and banal all at the same time. Searching for comfort in familiar things, perhaps more slowly, we have looked in at ourselves and out at others through the convenience of an illuminated screen.

Even though life is/was different, things keep moving along.

After all, it is still life…

Continuing the exploration of the contemporary iterations of the still-life genre - the exhibition present artworks manifesting impermanence, memory, slippages, familiarity, and the everyday.

In total, these artworks weave together a narrative document of the artist making sense of his/her life and have lent themselves to all manner of adventurous visual interpretation. As the title ’Evocative Objects: Still Life’ suggests, this exhibition considers the relationship between stillness and life, inanimate and animate, in today’s image inundated world.

These artworks are not just beautiful or realistic renderings of static objects. The still life, rather, is an evolving system of representation and of meaning, directly related to the transformations of society and of artistic discourse. It addresses certain positions a society maintains in relation to its objects: realities, fantasies, and desires. Similarly, it transcribes the manner in which the art deals with these truths or untruths— the way the artist reinvents a visual language specifically keyed to their implementation.

This suggests that still, life is truly a universal language, but simultaneously has the ability to share personal significance. With its many incarnations, the genre of still life continues to play an important contemporary role in helping to decode the shifting space where cultural identity and personality collide.

This exhibition examines how still life continues to be an important component within the work of our artist stable. Through various mediums and styles, each artist interprets the genre differently. However, all use the represented object to comment, explore and reveal to the viewer, more than what meets the eye.

Exhibiting Artists include artist, Manisha Agarwal, Sripriya Mozumdar, Ramesh Kumar, Raju T

- Ruchi Sharma, Curator