Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by the New Delhi-based artist Jagannath Panda.

Panda’s portraits of the burgeoning new city of Gurgaon (a suburb of New Delhi, where he lives and works) illustrate the tensions to be found there, as over-development threatens natural habitats and infrastructures prove to be inadequate even before they are completed.

Panda’s works continue with his characteristic collage technique, in which the surface of the canvas or sculpture is built up with the addition of brocade fabrics, blended together to create the skins of beasts and feathers of birds, to mimic foliage or approximate man-made surfaces. In his painting and sculptures Panda’s animals appear as ghosts of the past. The act of dressing up animals with festive fabrics are reminiscent of the ancient burial ritual in which the dead are dressed up, both to celebrate their life and to guarantee a smooth afterlife.

His hybridized surface treatment corresponds with many of the artist’s themes, which focus on moments, locations and icons that are in a state of flux, caught between oppositions that are being reconciled only with both anxiety and confusion. Likewise, Panda’s mix of the mythological and the realistic points to the disoriented nature of Indian identity today, as it hopes to synthesize the traditional and the contemporary, the indigenous and the international, the imaginary and the actual.

Jagannath Panda was born in Bhubaneswar in 1970 and studied sculpture in India, Japan and England. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Nature Morte in New Delhi (2009, 2005, 2000); the Chemould Gallery in Mumbai (2007, 2000); and the Alexia Goethe Gallery in London (2009). He has been included in a wide number of important group shows including “Indian Highway IV” at the Lyons Museum of Contemporary Art, France; “Indian Highway V” at the MAXXI Museum in Rome (upcoming); “Transformation” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; “Chalo! India” at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; “Where in the World,” the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon; and “Midnight’s Children,” Studio la Citta, Verona, Italy (among many others).