A while back artist Sheela Gowda stated in an interview "Art is not about giving opinions in black and white terms. It is nuanced through a visual language that is also determined by the material and medium". Her current exhibition at Milan's Pirelli HangarBicocca - "Remains", her first major solo show in Italy - revolves around these two elements, material and medium, in an engaging way.
The exhibition, curated by Nuria Enguita and Lucia Aspesi, develops in the Navate and features around twenty installations, sculptures, watercolours and prints from 1996 to the present day, including newly commissioned work.
Born in Bhadravati, India, in 1957, Gowda studied and trained in painting at the Ken School of Art in Bangalore, at M.S. University, Baroda, and at Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan. These institutions offered her an education steeped in the Indian modernist tradition that looked also at popular imagery and craft traditions.
In the mid-'80s Gowda completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art under British figurative artist Peter de Francia.
Her practice developed from the pictorial space to three-dimensional works taking an abstract turn, while her work became more material-based in response to the sociopolitical situation in India in the 1980s and 1990s, associated with the rise of rightwing politics and acts of violence throughout the country.
Gowda's artworks implied indeed a collaboration, dialogue and exchange with and between local artistic traditions and international forms of art and the inclusion of the audience within her artworks.
The installations included in "Remains" range from different periods and are constructed using various materials and scales. At times they interact with the space, in other cases they seem to rebel to it, but all of them invite visitors to become part of them.
There is poetry in her textile pieces, a symbolic power shines instead through installations such as "And..." (2007) featuring cords made with red thread and sewing needles anointed with a paste of glue and kumkum, a pigment used in rituals.
Architecture is referred to in "Kagebangara" (2008) and "Darkroom" (2006), inspired by the shelters built by itinerant road workers in India, and made with recycled metal tar drums, often used to transport tree resin or oil, opened and flattened into sheets.
Sheets of flattened metal drums are also recycled into "Bandlis" in "What Yet Remains" (2017) - these metal bowls are used in the Indian construction industry to carry concrete slurry, sand and other building materials. Each sheet is cut by hand into 8 circular parts that are then pressed in hand-operated machines into shallow bowls. The bandlis is similar for its purpose to the wheelbarrow used in Europe, but it is intrinsically different at the same time since seems to grow together with the workers who lift it usually above their heads.
Local artisanal skills and craftsmanship are instrumental to make Gowda's pieces: everyday materials including incense, tar drums, ritual pigments, granite stones used as spice-grinding kitchen tools, hair, needles, threads, rubber and cow dung are transformed through handmade techniques becoming artworks that hint at labor, economy and ingenuity.
Cow dung is particularly important since it is considered sacred and it is employed in rural India for construction and as a fuel. In Gowda's practice it is used for paintings and sculptures: "Mortar Line" (1996) is for example a sculpture made with a double row of cow dung bricks that form a curved line.
Gowda's hair ropes integrate instead hair collected as offerings from the people at offering sites and have different meanings tackling the ritualistic, daily and economic spheres, they are indeed mementos of a vow taken, they are used as talismans on motor vehicles and they point at the sale of human hair in world markets.
"Remains" also features two new installations - "Tree Line" and "In Pursuit of" (both 2019): in the former bands of raw natural rubber (supplied by Pirelli in collaboration with its technological center CCM for Research and Development) were woven, creating a linear surface of geometric texture; in the latter, the artist employed human hair to create two large black forms in dialogue with the surrounding architecture.
And while this exhibition first and foremost explores the material vs medium dichotomy, the installations and artworks included are open to different interpretations. As the artist herself explains in a press release: "It is true that my work comes from certain specific contexts, but the final nature of the work is shaped to a level of abstraction: the kind of abstraction I am talking about is not only an aesthetic proposition, but one which does not disembowel the work of meaning and allows for a multiplicity of readings."
Image credits for this post
1 and 2.
Sheela Gowda
And That Is No Lie, 2015
It Stands Fallen, 2015-2016
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
3.
Sheela Gowda
Stopover, 2012
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
4.
Sheela Gowda
Kagebangara, 2008
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Collection of Sunitha and Niall Emmart
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
5.
Sheela Gowda
Mortar Line, 1996 (detail)
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Photo: Agostino Osio
6.
Sheela Gowda
"Remains", exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
7.
Sheela Gowda
What Yet Remains, 2017
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
8.
Sheela Gowda
Untitled (Cow Dung), 1992-2012
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
9.
Sheela Gowda
Protest My Son, 2011
Exhibition copy (2019) from a work in the Van Abbemuseum collection, Eindhoven
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
10 and 11.
Sheela Gowda
If You Saw Desire, 2015
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
12.
Sheela Gowda
Tree Line, 2019
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
13.
Sheela Gowda
"Remains", exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019
Courtesy of the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca
Photo: Agostino Osio
14.
Sheela Gowda
Collateral, 2007 (detail)
Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Photo: Agostino Osio
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