Lot 64: Untitled

SHEELA GOWDA (B. 1957) Untitled signed and dated 'Sheela Gowda '89' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 59¼ x 72 in. (150.5 x 182.9 cm.) Painted in 1989

150.5 x 182.9 cm.

Gallery 7, Mumbai

In her art, Sheela Gowda tackles head on middle-class morality and the roles of women in modern life. Represented by abstracted figures that stand awash in waves of vivid colours, women figure as the sublime, the erotic, and the mundane. Form and content collide to express the emotionality and tensions of the female being, recalling the figuration of artist like Nalini Malani. In a sense, Gowda's works figure as challenges to the constraints of artistic movements--moving beyond figuration, she harnesses the capacity of unbridled form and colour to emote. As a result, the cloud-like forms inhabiting her works alternately take on and deny the human visage. Lyrically musing on Gowda's dexterity with colour, Natasha Eaton wrote of Gowda's thick lines of pigment, that try "to navigate (their) way through a labyrinth of colour, violence, a cacophony of voices, brushes, buckets, threads, looms [...] streaming veins, revolution and death." (N. Eaton, Colour, Art, and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation, London, 2013, p. 3). The violence and harmony of the woman's world is celebrated, denigrated, and felt. Gowda first came into the international spotlight in the mid-2000s, exhibited by New York's Bose Pacia gallery in 2006. Subsequently, she has participated in the Venice and Sharjah Biennales, 2009, and exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2014, among other major international venues. This finalist for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize is also featured in the collection of New York's Guggenheim Museum.