Bhubaneswar: Gurugram-based artist Jagannath Panda’s solo exhibition ‘Echoes of the unfathomed worlds’ will be premiered at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery on December 8.
The show will be open for public viewing at gallery hours from December 9 to January 19.
The show features 5 canvases elaborating his engagement with structures and forms built with materials ranging from fabric to acrylic paint.
Layered in several artistic skills, these canvases merge and distort the visual world into several worlds that can be seen unfolding several realities simultaneously.
Panda’s 9 sculptures explore collage-making, papier maché, rice paper, rice weed, fabric, auto paint, plywood, and found objects.
He particularly engages with these materials to create a technique-specific medium that blends the borders of the medium in his art-making.
So, objects from his son’s childhood memories attached to his plastic toys, such as legos, are important symbolic narratives employed in his sculptures.
The collage pieces are cut out of a gardening book that gave him information on the know-how of planting trees and nurturing life.
There are 12 photographs mediated with other material interventions that are also important to his genre of art-making.
These photographs capture a group of Odissi dance performers being trained under their master. During the practice session, Panda catches them in their most concentrated state while creating a moment of witnessing their various movements and postures. These photos have been further treated with details of wood, auto paint, wallpaper, fabric, and pigments to create an artistic interweaving of metaphors, techniques, and insights.
Panda’s work is an amalgamation of materiality, memories, and techniques that expound a diverse range of subjective areas. His art language involves a philosophical purview, architectural detailing, impressions of his natural surroundings, and personal memories enmeshed in the grand expression of a cosmos.
He explores the boundlessness and a particular quality of belief in the omniscient which he further relates to reasoning and reflection to look at the infinite as a tactile concept. While he engages cultural practices and traditional belief systems in his art, he also negotiates through the immediacy of his style in colours and symmetrical forms that break out into the idea of a wide, open space or the universe.
Panda received initial training in a BFA programme at the College of Arts and Crafts, Bhubaneswar. Then he pursued an MFA programme at MSU, Baroda. And, later, he obtained an MFA in sculpture at the Royal College of Arts, London.
Panda’s long artistic journey has been impressionable at this moment in the Arts. His last solo exhibition ‘The Crystal City’ was held in 2017 in New Delhi.
The artist has also showcased his works in a solo exhibition at London’s Halcyon Gallery in 2015. His works have been showcased all across South Asia and in parts of America. Once again, he ventures to bring Delhi to another experience of his recent collection featuring around 26 seminal artworks under one roof.
