Deepak Talwar

About Deepak Talwar

Deepak Talwar Gallery Representing some of the most exciting young artists working
today and the Estates of essential 20th century artists from India like Nasreen Mohamedi
and Rummana Hussain, Talwar Gallery is a contemporary art gallery focusing on artists from
the Indian Subcontinent and its Diaspora. Underlying the gallery vision is the belief that the
artist is geographically located not the art. Their desires to exceed expectations of locality,
of self; to extract purpose and significance from their familiar environs, to create, these
artists have renegotiated the borders and refuse to singularly site themselves or their work.
Their search and their work traverse any simplified categorization based on geography,
religion, culture or race.

Deepak Talwar, New York was launched in September 2001 and Deepak Talwar New Delhi
opened in 2007. Deepak Talwar, founder of Talwar Gallery, has been working with
contemporary artists from India since 1996.

EDITIONS
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Alia Syed
Ranjani Shettar
Shambhavi Singh
Check the website for more

ARPITA SINGH
Tying down time

May 6 September 30, 2017

Deepak Talwar Gallery is delighted and honored to present its first exhibition of Arpita
Singh. The solo presentation, Tying down time features works from 1973 to 1982 and are on
view for the first time.

The works in Tying down timepredominantly abstract compositions on paper, principally

reliant on line and primarily monochromaticcreate an aesthetic bridge linking Singhs early
work with her better-known figurative paintings since the late 1980s. The works allow a rare
insight into the formal foundations of Singhs oeuvre, revealing both a serious curiosity
about line, depth and space, and a playful improvisationa willingness to suspend certainty
in the search for new. These tendencies continue into and indeed sustain Singhs later
practice are first glimpsed here: the short, impulsive and repetitive stroke of the pen, and
later the brush; the tendency for these marks to converge and condense, building up into
form or coalescing into pattern. Dense yet fragile textured surfaces seem to just hold
together, as if concealing the turbulence below. Tracing the past as well as foreshadowing
the future, the works in Tying down time point to Singhs engagement with textiles, a result
of her time spent as a designer at the Weavers Service Centre in Delhi during the 1960s.
Calling on and then expanding the structure of warp and weft, Singhs works make use of
the relative openness of the pagebecoming records of a remarkable period of freedom in
her practice, spurred on by the desire, excitement and uncertainty of experimentation.

The aesthetic value of the body of works in Tying down time is compounded further by
their status as objectsthe materiality that allows them to register time as much as to
represent it. The tears, punctures and scratched surfaces original to the moment of creation,
merge at times with stains, watermarks and ruptures, visible markers of transition over the
last four decades. The effect of the many relocations and disruptions that give contour to
Singhs career and life, these traces have been purposely retained by the artist, allowed to
mingle with her own pen strokes and color washes. In embracing these marks of time as
much as those of her hand, Singh assents that they not only express the works past life, its
origin, but its destinies as well.

Singh has long been celebrated for the large, figurative paintings that followed the rich
period of innovation considered in this exhibition. Vibrantly colorful and iconographically
dense, these works gesture towards mythology and folklore, while drawing on the
expressiveness of the line and textures evident in Tying down time. Singular in their allusion
to contemporary Indian life, Singhs works forge a unique visual vocabulary and narrative
sensibility that have had major influence on the generations of artists who have followed
her.

Arpita Singh was born in 1937 in West Bengal, India, and moved with her family to Delhi in
1946, where she has since lived and worked. She attended School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic,
and after graduating, she worked as a textile designer at the Weavers Service Centre, part
of the Handloom Board of India. Her work has been featured in exhibitions around the
world, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London; The Pompidou Centre, Paris; Museo
Nacional de Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Museum of
Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi; Fukuoka Asian
Art Museum, Japan; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Asia Society, New York; Art Gallery of
New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Lalit Kala Akademi,
New Delhi; National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai & New Delhi.

Arpita Singh lives and works in New Delhi, India.

RANJANI SHETTAR
Bubble trap and a double bow

February 1 October 14, 2017

Deepak Talwar Gallery is delighted to present Bubble trap and a double bow, an exhibition
of new works by Ranjani Shettar.

Each of the works in Bubble trap and a double bow seems to radiate from within itself, as if
moved by the swell and flow of its own cadence. Emerging from Ranjanis purposeful play,
the works probe the tension inherent in materialsa latent force imparting shape to the
physical world, even when it is not visible. The works appear in natural movementspiraling
off the ground or rippling musically across the walls, stretching weightlessly in space or
balanced harmoniously on the ground. Inspired by nature and informed by science, the
works are tacitly shaped by the simplest of tools from the artists own hands.
Ranjanis keen sensitivity to her materials manifests throughout Bubble trap and a double
bow, often allowing them to speak through the grains of the wood, the pigments on muslin
or the translucent hues of thousands of unique molded wax beads. To shape the works final
form, Ranjani balances the weight of her hand-made mark with natures organic symmetry.
In an outdoor work created from found architectural objects, while retaining the energy and
the character of the materials past lives, she creates a new environment, where amidst their
pull and push, a strong yet elegant equilibrium is established, one relying on constant
exchange rather than stasison actions held in a dancers counterpoint.

The works in Bubble trap and a double bow present another layer in Ranjanis ever-
deepening engagement with the natural worlda product of focused and sustained
attention to issues as local as material and as wide-reading as ecological responsibility.
Often marrying traditionally used materials refined over centuries in India, with a sustained
effort to grasp and engage the global from her life in the countryside, her work brings past,
present, and future into dialogue. Over the course of her career, her sculpture and
installation has consistently sought to put her art into a dynamic relationship to the space
around itto release it from sculptural stillness and insert it into the flow of movement and
experience. Appearing as a kind of catalyst for the entrancing systems of energy that she
activates, Ranjani challenges us to bring new awareness to every interaction with the world
around us, small and large.

Ranjani Shettars works have been the subject of several museum exhibitions including solos
at The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA (2008); The Modern Art Museum,
Fort Worth, TX (2008-9); The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) (2009);
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2011); Hermes Fondation, Singapore
(2011) and BDL Museum, Mumbai, India (2012). Her works have also been featured in
exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY (2010); Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi
(2011, 2012, 2013), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); 10th Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010); 55th
Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, PA (2008); 9th Lyon Biennial, France (2007);
8th Sharjah Biennial (2007); 15th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006); Artpace, Texas (2006);
Cartier Fondation, Paris (2005); Wexner Center, OH (2005) and The Walker Art Center, MN
(2003). In 2012 in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York the
artist created a limited edition project, Varsha.
 Ranjani Shettar lives and works in Karnataka, India.

Contact Deepak Talwar Gallery:

Talwar Gallery | New York Talwar Gallery | New Delhi

108 East 16 Street New York NY 10003 C-84 Neeti Bagh New Delhi 110049 India

T 212 673 3096 T 91 11 4605 0307

Hours Hours

Tuesday Saturday 11:00 am 6:00 pm Monday Saturday 11:00 am 7:00 pm

Summer Hours

Monday Friday 11:00 am 6:00 pm