Sanjiv Sinha’s latest body of work is an autobiographical series exploring this life and times
Sanjiv Sinha is getting ready for his first solo in a while called Am IIJ to be held at India Habitat Centre’s Visual Art Gallery from May 1.
It’s a personal series, curated by Vikas Nand Kumar. Annurag Sharma of UAPl Group, organising the event, commented, “This is Sanjeev Sinha’s life on canvas,” after we were taken around the vault in his office, where large canvases are stored.
Scrolling through his website, we referred back to the show with Dutch artist Diane Hagen, which had lots of abstract designs, along with other series, including collages using materials like steel, dead feathers etc. Hagen remarked, “The canvases adjoined, indicating the individual ego didn’t exist. Or it was combined.” While Sanjiv shared, “My job is to join, not to separate.”
And he recalled of that show with Hagen, “I would visit abandoned places and look at things people believed in. Some object cherished in the name of God. Or maybe in the memory of one’s beloved. War was also going on at the time. Hence I did a woman in a burqa. Women are suffering so much.” The suffering echoed in his use of peacock feathers. “They were a celebration, but also appear like tears of upset, reflecting your eyes. You experience great happiness outside, and great sorrow inside.”
His projects in the interim, have included a Buddha installation in Bodh Gaya, and, “a modern installation in the centre of Patna. Probably the first of its kind.”
Sinha worked overseas for years in the Netherlands and parts of Europe,then returned to India. He remarked, “I went searching for new language. Art is all over. I focussed on what I like. Not what I wanted. There is a spiritual way of looking. As one searches for new life and simple things. I’ve often used simple symbols in my work.”
last year, he featured a fibreglass Barbie on a sofa, behind two earlier collages at the United Art Fair.
His new canvases include butterflies, tigers, barbie dolls, female mythical figures. It’s a psychedelic series brimming with metaphors. And mostly dark acrylic, with sparks of light.
“There is a narrative tradition in Indian art. They tell stories. I don’t. I am concerned with feeling,” shared the artist who spent the last two-three years travelling mostly in the hills.”
He mused, “Things disappear and appear. There is impermanence. It’s a mystical thing. Take the butterfly, with its beauty and short span of life. The turtle (also painted), has the longest life. I deal with hope, fear, joy, grief. How we live. How we look for what we don’t know.”
Some figures are of powerful women like Kali. He told us that he’s making a fibreglass installation, “of a naked Kali and a Barbie in a bathtub. One is black. One, white. One is wild. One is innocent. But even in the wild one there is innocence.” He then said feelingly, “I hope people understand my paintings are not decorative but symbolic. I’ve incorporated elements from arenas like politics and capitalism. The misuse of religion. But you have to look closely at them.”
Society he said “is like multiple mirrors that reflect many things. At the end the knowledge you acquire becomes one of the many layers of your personality. My own notion is that I’m not making art, but coming to heavy realisation. But with heavy realisation also comes a lot of pain.” He often wears dark glasses a lot of time. Maybe its to hide the redness of his eyes from indulging his spirit.
“His version is that “a decade ago I went through a lot of emotional problems and found that glasses helped to escape glances. I can hide behind them, but I also become the observer.”
By SM Verghis