Nature Morte presents a solo exhibition of new works by the Mumbai artist Aaditi Joshi. This exhibition also marks Joshi’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi. For a number of years, Aaditi Joshi has made her art exclusively out of recycled plastics. Of course, plastics are now destroying humanity and the planet, choking landfills and seeping into our bloodstreams, but they have also enabled countless benefits and make our modern lives possible. Joshi savours these contradictions. In her newest body of work, the artist has focused on polypropylene bags, these being the white woven bags ubiquitously located at construction sites, used for the storage and transport of sand and concrete. For Joshi, the significance of the polypropylene goes beyond its materiality and functionality. Instead it is a medium for her to convey a free expression of colours and forms.
Joshi dismantles and washes the bags and approaches them as a found textile, now primed for her manipulation. Paint is applied to parts and the material is crafted into a low-relief, undulating surface, redolent of the surface of an alien planet, the ebbs and flows of the typography of the art work emphasised by Joshi’s sensitive application of colours and deft handling of textures. Her compositional approach is both programmatic and spontaneous and the final results are works that defy categorization, synthesising painting, collage, sculpture, and textile art.
Aaditi Joshi (born in 1980) occasionally stops on the Mumbai roadside to absorb the surreal landscape before her eyes-enormous hills of discarded plastic form a rugged urban topography. Joshi says that when looking at these materials and understanding the social fallout they cause, she is disturbed but also moved to incorporate them into her artistic practice. Joshi graduated in Drawings and Painting from L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai, India in 2001. Select exhibitions of her work include Petromelancholia, curated by Alexander Klose, Brutus, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2023); Rhizome – Tracing Ecocultural Identities, curated by Jesal Thacker at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum, Mumbai, India (2023); OIL- Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, curated by Dr. Andreas Beitin, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2021-22); Megacities Asia, curated by Al Miner and Laura Weinstein at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston, USA; (M)other India, Galerie du Jour–AgneÌ€s B., Paris, France (2011); SH Contemporary, Shanghai, China (2012) and Present-future, curated by Dr. Sarayu Doshi at the NGMA in Mumbai (2005). She was awarded a Fellowship for the Lucas Artists Residency Program at the Montalvo Art Center, CA, USA (2014) as well as the MK Search Art (MKSA) residency projectContemporary Renaissance, for the Indian-Italian cultural exchange program at Casa Masaccio, Tuscany, Italy. Joshi was also shortlisted for the SÌŒKODA Prize (2013).
Words Platform Desk
Date 25.09.2024