Jitish Kallat holds a BFA in painting from the Sir J.J.School of Art, Mumbai. He was a Fellow of the school from 1996-7. His first solo exhibition, ‘P. T. O.’ was mounted in 1997, at the Gallery Chemould. And there has been no looking back since.
Extremely articulate and aware of his position within a select international art circuit, Kallat is prolific, adept and innovative. The hallmark of his paintings is a highly graphic surface texture that’s harks to photocopied ad transferred images and rubbed/ eroded wall surfaces. His interest in cultural studies and material choices leads him to create large monumental works that incorporate text matter on reflective surfaces, such as mirrors embedded in heavy metal frames.
Jitish often locates himself in his paintings, as the protagonist, giving his works a distinctively autobiographical slant. The scope of the autobiographical equations in his works extends beyond the immediate and personal, to include the artist’s relation to his ancestry, and to the processes of time and mortality. The word carries a lot of weight for the artist. Many of his works carry legends. What began as a joke amidst classmates at the Sir J.J. School of Art, found a place on his early canvases in the form of the copyright icon. The icon humorously brings into focus the supreme irony of ‘copyrighting’ an artwork which itself is a pastiche of elements drawn and ‘appropriated’ from so many histories, contexts, people, and collaborations. It is as much a statement, of acceptance/acknowledgement (of the in/formal process of authorship assignation), as well as his critique of modernism.
When he began to show his works in the early 1990s, his surfaces were deliberately scarred and vexed in reflection of a city that labours under the crippling load of psychological pressure. Acting in response to these pressures, Kallat produced works which ironically portrayed the metaphors of urban life along with self portraits. These soon led to include a socially magnified sensitivity to the aspect of survival of an individual in a crowd. His images pulled in from mass media are photocopied, manipulated and transferred on to the canvas, dressed in grey- greens, rust- browns and deep reds. These seem to flicker on a television screen infused with text drawn from SMS’s, emails, advertising slogans and video games, for viewers to decode and deduce. His multi-layered, richly literary titles haven given way to crisper, more informal texualities of these modern day messages.
In one of his recent exhibitions, ‘Humiliation Tax’ shown as an ensemble in ‘The Lie of the Land’ (Walsh Gallery, Chicago, 2004) it could be clearly seen that there has been a marked stabilization of experiments. It was in these works that Kallat first mapped out the mid-ground between abstraction and caricature, trying out a wager on public imagery, in which the ‘personal’ image could ring off, aspire to, quote and yet overtake the billboard. The exhibition demonstrated a process of technological improvisations, in which the artist stepped in and out of conventional painterly practise, allowing complete visualities and textualities to enter his space. At the most immediate visual level, he broke the colour limits he has set for himself, from his blues and reds through oranges and pinks, to a more complex and enriched chromatics.
According to Jitish Kallat his art is more like a researcher's project who uses quotes rather than an essay, with each painting necessitating a bibliography. His obsessive use of the self image in his paintings as the main protagonist makes his works autobiographical. The autobiography addresses personal relations as well as the ones he has with his ancestry, time, death. It acknowledges an acceptance as well as his critique of the modernist concept of authorship in which he revels.
The artist lives and works in Mumbai.
