JITISH KALLAT (B. 1974)

Jitish Kallat’s interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, video and photography. A graduate of the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, Kallat has established himself as one of the leading contemporary artists practicing in India today. Living and working in the pluralistic mega-city of Mumbai, Kallat draws upon the visual cultures of the city to represent the multiplicity of the daily lives of Mumbaikars. The artist’s vivid figurative works serve as both a celebration of the city as well as a political critique of socioeconomic divides across the nation.

"The long titles were often playful mechanisms to provoke the viewer to play detective with the elusive promise of meaning. Text has always played a crucial role in my visual endeavours [...] A simple shift of the typeface used for the text on a painting can dramatically alter the texture and tine of the piece. The hard-edge, red fonts in the Friendly Fire pieces, for instance, evoke agitprop posters. I play a lot with type-faces. The red, faux-religious symbols in the Friendly Fire pieces are simply the characters 'A', 'B', 'C', 'M' etc. rendered in font WP iconic Symbol A. Such vacuous interventions mirror the belief-driven madness of consuming polluted sea water. I think this engagement with the inscribed title perhaps comes from the fact that my earliest visual references were the billboard and the television screen, where one often consumes images and texts simultaneously" (Artist statement, N. Miall, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient, Zurich, 2008, p. 56).