Uday Dhar showcases his first solo show in the country.
All art is a form of self-expression, so it’s easy to see in Uday K Dhar’s rather ‘bold’ paintings — bare male torsos and cross-dressed apsaras and rakshasas — a correspondence with his own experiences as a gay artist of Indian origin in the United States. And many among his viewers in Delhi will find provocative works such as ‘I want to live the glamorous life’, a series of 12 panels of digital prints of found images, a advertisement for “A love guru” and “Become an adult movie star”, and some text such as, “I can’t give out names, but my friend and I have bedded a fair number of Mumbai’s Page 3 regulars...”
But provocation, or at least sensationalism is not the point of Dhar’s first solo in India.
What is are the many layers of diverse experience that have shaped him in the many places where he has lived — London, where he was born; Patna, where he grew up; the US, where his father, a doctor, shifted when he was in class eight; and Germany, where he found art as a calling. It’s a “life full of collages” that many of us, and not just in the NRI community, can recognise and identify with.
“I am fascinated how different elements, images, concepts, cultures and materials are combined, processed, reworked, juxtaposed to create a new synthesis of form and feeling. With this as inspiration, I have created works that are a commentary of how we now live life in the age of globalisation. As we are constantly bombarded by images through advertising, marketing, social sites, flashy web content...” says Dhar.
Collage, thus, is a leitmotif of Dhar’s works. He not just sticks things on the canvas and paints over/around them but also works upon them many times over — the image, digitally printed on canvas, is spray-painted with text or enhanced with paint and glitter. There’s also the obvious juxtaposition of east and west, as in ‘Exquisite Corpse’ which plays off the Kali iconography so fashionable in the West with imagery from pornography sites as an illustration of the Madona-whore complex.
Does he feel India is ready for this? Yes, the younger, more cosmopolitan generation, Dhar feels, but, perhaps, the older is a little fazed. “An elderly couple came in last night [at the opening] and I could hear them wondering what it meant.” But then for Dhar, this is exactly what art is supposed to do — beget a questioning of one’s beliefs.
