Anant Joshi's new work: Masquerade and other Apologues, is a series of paintings and watercolours.

 

For Joshi the use of the toy, the plastic play-thing that children use remains never to be the play-thing. For him the toy assumes new life, altered forms and hybrid existences that take on masquerades that become ubiquitous to a very "joshisque" way of thinking and working.

 

Carefully collected toys become actors for incendiary circumstances that have been part of an ongoing real life incident/drama/politic.

 

The series of panting’s assumed to be large format newspapers carefully painted upon with these joshisque characters - albeit pixilated due to the exaggerated format of the work.

 

Also included in this exhibition are very small, dense, intensely layered watercolours. Political cartoons exist in a genre of their own. Joshi's fascination with these pantomime images from well-known cartoonists subsumed him for the past year - where almost every newspaper and internet-site was scanned to make a narrative of events that took form in his own work- richly layered with paint, but wordless.

World events became his stage and Joshi became an engrossed voyeur.