Samira Sheth highlights the show of paintings and drawings by artist Siddhartha Kararwal
It is so heartening to enter 2021 on a happy notes with ‘The Gum in the Chest will see the Mountain Burst’, a delightful show of paintings and drawings by visual artist Siddhartha Kararwal. Presented by Samira Sheth in association, with The Project Café, Goa and curated by Kirti Parihar, the exhibition recently opened to a glamorous crowd, eager to catch a glimpse of this really cool artist. So far, Kararwal is known mainly for his interesting installation art, which has featured in numerous prestigious gallery exhibitions, art summits and at diverse venues including at the Echoes of the Earth Music festival in Bangalore; the NGMA, Mumbai; Diesel stores across Mumbai and more famously on the cover of Cosmopolitan India with actress Jahnvi Kapoor sitting on his pink ‘Chewing Gum Couch’. He has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in the Visual Arts from the prestigious Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and a background in sculpture and this comes through to great effect in his large scale paintings, now on display in Goa.
Kirti Parihar says, “This is the first solo exhibition of paintings of a formidable talent who is also an acclaimed installation artist known for using everyday items like clothing, plastic, and papers to send a message through his creations. There is really no way to put a label on his sense of style – flamboyant, yet reserved, whimsical, yet sensible. It can be all of those things.”
“Something is very charismatic and intriguing when you interact with the characters of Siddhartha Kararwal’s world which germinated from his lockdown diaries. His artworks are an expression of his observations arising from standing alone in the balcony gazing at the empty roads and flyovers and being bombarded with everyday uncertainty. The caricaturist characters and the amusing titles of his works are his humorous ways of narrating the chapters from his lockdown days.”
“The exhibition is a welcome change from the fears and anxieties of 2020. Kararwal’s artwork shakes viewers out of that state by piquing their curiosity and bringing a sense of joy and hope with his caricature like, Pop art faces and figures,” adds Samira.
His Instagram-mable installation, ‘Too Much Idiot Box’ garnered a lot of attention on opening night which drew an interesting crowd including Kim Sharma, Suhel Seth and Lakshmi Menon, among other art lovers.
The all pervasive television culture of our time and its strong influence forms the theme of Kararwal’s dramatic installation that takes up an entire room. The power of the idiot box only got more intensified during the lockdown. “We are constantly bombarded with images from the idiot box – of celebrity, mass culture, the rays and colours and chaos of the screen being our only escape into a world of fantasy and of confronting our own boredom. Kararwal takes the idea of a mammoth overbearing television and blows it up into a hyper real installation – a punch in its viewer’s face, a shot of biting sarcasm. Make no mistake, underneath these charming cute cartoon characters there is definitely a bite to Siddhartha Kararwal’s work,” says Samira Sheth. In his epic scale painting ‘The Second Last Supper’ for instance, the artist presents animal and human forms in a deceptively simple style. He says, “The weight of the concept is gone. I tried to make it a little lighter, that this is not the last supper, there is more coming; there is a little drop of hope”
