Lot description
Jitish KALLAT (India, b. 1974) Universal Recipient, 2008 Acrylic on canvas, bronze 249 × 173 cm Signed, dated and titled on back on stretcher *** Acrylic on canvas, bronze, signed, dated and titled on the reverse, 98 × 68⅛ in. Painted in 2008. "These paintings of inhabitants carrying cascades of stories on their heads become double portraits: simultaneous portraits of the city and its inhabitant," writes Kallat. In the Universal Recipient series, the artist erects Mumbai's security guards as monumental icons - migrant workers dressed in uniforms resembling ceremonial generals, guarding the megalopolis's most opulent enclaves while remaining among its most precarious inhabitants. Their hair - which Kallat calls urban turban - forms a labyrinth of silhouettes, vehicles and street scenes, a simultaneous double portrait of the man and the city that inhabits him. Two bronze supports in the shape of owls, replicas of the sculpted ornaments of Victoria Terminus station, anchor the work in the symbolic topography of Mumbai. Born in Mumbai in 1974, Jitish Kallat lives and works in the city. Trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art (BFA, 1996), since 2000 he has been developing a multidisciplinary practice - painting, photography, sculpture, installation - centered on time, memory and the human condition. His work takes as its starting point the urban reality of Mumbai, from which he extracts visual systems linking the everyday to the cosmological. In the series *Universal Recipient* (2008), anonymous figures from the city - guards, passers-by - are monumentalized into hybrid portraits where the individual and the metropolis merge. His photographic and luminous works subject ordinary materials, notably food, to scientific imaging techniques to generate images evocative of celestial phenomena, establishing correspondences between the human body, food and the cosmos. His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Jose Museum of Art. In 2017, a major retrospective, *Here After Here 1992-2017*, was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.