PRESS RELEASE

Following the success of a group show last year in collaboration with Gallery Nature Morte, the Alexia Goethe Gallery is proud to present Aditya Pande's first solo exhibition in London in another collaboration with Gallery Nature Morte.

Aditya Pande is based in New Delhi and studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. His studio production oscillates between the fine and applied arts, two and three dimensions, the sensuously tactile and the aggressively optical.

Pande begins his "paintings" with drawings made on the computer, weaving a tangled web of synthetic line work, looping through grand arabesques and squiggling together skeins to form animals and people, abstractions and characters. His line work is frenetic, compressed, and descriptive. These drawings are then printed on to paper or canvas and used as the starting points for elaborate compositions which may imply narrative or hesistantly elucidate a three-dimensional space. Pande anchors his sketched forms with bold blocks of skewed colors, usually applied with glossy enamel paints that contrast against the more powdery finish of the ink-jet print, sometimes further articulated by the appearance of an unblinking eyeball or a shiny nose. Collage elements are next mixed in: scraps of paper, wire or string, glitter, and scabs of plastic paint. The end result is a pleasingly demented farce that is the collusion of painting, print-making, graphic design and draftsmanship.

Just how "Indian" (or not) is the art of Aditya Pande would depend on the viewer and his/her own cultural constructs. One could point to Pande's infatuation with the visual idioms of popular culture, his chromatic sophistication, his puckish wit, and his connoisseurship of craftsmanship as distinctly Indian traits. But then again, perhaps not. Performing a perfectly Post-Modern mélange within a globalised scenario, Pande turns a blind eye to the status (or lack thereof) attributed to various visual languages and artisanal materials, a position which perhaps comes more readily when entrenched in the cacophony of the sub-continent. The London art audience has by now become well-enough-acquainted with a number of distinct voices from India (such as Anish Kapoor, Subodh Gupta and Raqib Shaw) so that they may not need to pin any over-arching nationalistic sensibilities on the creative output of one individualistic young man.

Text written by Peter Nagy 2009




Aditya Pande was born in Lucknow, trained at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, and currently lives in New Delhi. He has exhibited in New Delhi, Mumbai, London and New York.

For further press material please contact the gallery on 00 44 (0) 20 7629 0090 or via email on press@alexiagoethegallery.com