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Gayatri Rangachari Shah profile imageGayatri Rangachari Shah
Why you should look forward to Mahesh Baliga’s first international solo exhibition

The Vadodara-based artist–whose work is on display at David Zwirner in London–tells us about painting from memory and how inspiration is found in daily moments that resonate with him emotionally

“I start with an emotion that makes me want to paint,” says Mahesh Baliga, the Vadodara-based contemporary artist whose first overseas solo exhibition opens today in London at David Zwirner, the blue-chip art gallery. The show, titled Drawn to remember, features 40 casein tempera works, on view for the first time at the gallery’s Upper Room. Debuting at the powerhouse art space, which is headquartered in New York but is also present in London, Paris and Hong Kong, is a major accolade for 40-year-old Baliga. After all, this is a gallery that represents artistic heavyweights such as Yayoi Kusama, Donald Judd and Carol Bove among a fleet of others.

Mahesh Baliga, Eye hospital, 2022 © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Mahesh Baliga, Eye hospital, 2022 © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Mahesh Baliga, Aveek cutting nails,  2022  © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Mahesh Baliga, Aveek cutting nails,  2022  © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Baliga, who typically depicts small-scale works featuring familiar yet imaginative impressions of daily life in India, has steadily gained a stealth following since he began exhibiting in 2007. (Full disclosure: I have a work by the artist.) As Cristina Vere Nicoll, director at Zwirner in London explains, “The small scale of the paintings creates a singular sense of intimacy that really draws the viewer. While the day-to-day is depicted, it's the surreal interventions, the dreamlike interludes and Mahesh's remarkable sense of colour and composition that make these paintings so captivating.” The only Indian artist to have previously had a solo show in the Upper Room was the pioneering modernist Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904-1980).

It’s all about the details

Baliga, a soft-spoken, measured man, seeks inspiration from daily life, and is constantly thinking about how all that he observes can become a painting. He describes the works being shown in London as based on memories that have been triggered by pain. Why pain? “If I am not able to paint something out of desire, then that itself is a type of pain,” he says. “The other is the pain of what is happening in my surroundings which affect me, where I can’t do anything to help.” Referencing the Covid-19 pandemic, during which he lost a dear friend, Baliga painted images based on his memory of interactions, notes from conversations, turning the emotion of helplessness into imagery. “When I paint from memory, I put my emotion based on the image captured in my mind,” he says.

Mahesh Baliga, Flowering self, 2022  © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Mahesh Baliga, Flowering self, 2022 © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Sree Banerjee Goswami, founder and director of Mumbai-based Project 88, who has represented Baliga since he graduated from the M.S. University in Vadodara in 2007, says that his paintings have always stood out for her. “They are very gentle, humorous and thoughtful,” she notes. “Even as a student, Mahesh was thinking about the act of painting. There were insertions in his paintings which had humour and historical references. One painting I remember clearly from his graduate show was called The Drawing Competition. It was a big painting, set in a park in an expanse of green, with lots of figures of children drawing. In that very early work, there was a little Mughal miniature reference, if you looked closely enough. It was interventions like that which drew me to his art.” Since those early years, Project 88 has had numerous solo shows by the artist.

Visual vocabularies

Baliga, who grew up in a small town called Mudbidri, outside Bangalore, recalls being 10 years old and watching a temple priest making idols and painting signboards. The young Mahesh also started making idols. He did not grow up painting because Mudbidri was so small that there were seldom materials with which to paint. “We had one shop and if you asked for red colour, the shopkeeper would say ‘come next week,’” he says. A school teacher encouraged him to participate in art competitions and his interest grew. He later attended Mysore University, where he graduated with a gold medal in painting in 2005 and then moved to Vadodara to study further. Before the pandemic, he taught art in Gujarat and in Delhi, but now focuses on his painting full-time. Baliga says he is inspired by Indian artists such as Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel and the late Bhupen Khakhar. “If they didn’t paint, I would not have painted,” he says. He compares the process of painting thus: “I keep the idea in my tummy for a long time, whatever the images are. I want to digest them till they are going to be painted. Then I start and keep it free to flow. It is a process of capturing the unpredictable, the ephemeral, that which can’t be captured.”

Mahesh Baliga, Safe place, 2022 © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

Mahesh Baliga, Safe place, 2022 © Mahesh Baliga. Casein on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner

The artist: Mahesh Baliga

The artist: Mahesh Baliga

Between the real and the imagined

For David Zwirner gallery, which has been deepening its engagement in South Asia, showing Baliga’s works seems fitting, given that the gallery views current artistic practices in the region as very strong. “India has such a strong legacy of painting, so we've been particularly interested in Baliga's oeuvre,” Vere Nicoll explains. As for Baliga, he says paintings have to transcend the subject from which they initially sprang. “There is an emotion and then fiction is added to it.” It is the real and the imagined, all at once.

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