Christie’s roundel
Lot 22 PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTOR, NEW YORK

SURENDRAN NAIR (B. 1956)

Forty Winks - 1 (Corollary Mythologies)

Closed23 March 2010

Price Realised

USD 43,750

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SURENDRAN NAIR (B. 1956)
Forty Winks - 1 (Corollary Mythologies)
signed and dated 'Surendran '97' (lower right); titled ''Forty Winks' - 1 (Corollary Mythologies.)' (lower left)
watercolor on paper
65 x 44½ in. (165.1 x 113 cm.)
Painted in 1997

Specialist note

My work is informed by history, mythology, real and imaginary events, art history, notions of tradition and identity and its relationship with modernity, language, sexuality, politics, and other faiths, etc. Without emphasizing any of these in particular, I address these issues simultaneously. I create a vocabulary of images that are fed from a variety of sources and this offers me rich and diverse parables of reference to structure connectives and marry evocative associations of meaning. The images are often like cryptic clues, which assist one to decode the invested meaning that is disguised through oblique and elaborate devices of representation.
Surendran Nair (Artist Statement, written on the occasion of the exhibition The Bad Behavior of Singularities, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, January 2006, see: Horn Please, Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 2007, p. 154)