Public Notice 2 by Jitish Kallat will be among the 50 works to be featured at a special auction by the Christie’s and the Saatchi Gallery
The Saatchi Gallery and Christie’s recently announced Thinking Big, a special auction of major contemporary sculpture and installations offered to support the Saatchi Gallery’s continuing policy for free entry to all exhibitions and free education programme for schools.
Francis Outred, Christie’s Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe, said, “We have been working with the Saatchi Gallery on this project for about a year now. All the works will be offered without estimate or reserve. In addition, a state-of-the-art exhibition at the Sorting Office, a huge ex-postal building in the heart of london, will house major sculpture and installation from across the last 20 years, beginning with the Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers to Berlinde de Bruyckere, who is one of the stand out artists at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artists come from five different continents and the exhibition and auction will be a fundamental celebration of the sculpture in the 21st century. Thinking Big refers to the huge ambition and imagination of the artists, as much as it does to the scale of their work, and to the power of educating young people about art.”
Thinking Big features the work of 50 artists who have been shown at the Saatchi Gallery. Among the many leading contemporary artists included are Berlinde de Bruyckere, whose work at the Belgian Pavilion was a highlight of the 2013 Venice Biennale; Gert and Uwe Tobias, who had a solo show at london’s Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year; and David Altmejd, Karla Black and liu Wei, all of whom were selected for Art Basel’s Art Unlimited show of large-scale sculpture this year. Amongst the 50 works is Public Notice 2 by Jitish Kallat. The work was made in 2007 and consists four thousand four hundred and seventy-nine painted fiberglass parts and its dimensions are variable. Public Notice 2 recalls the historic speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi, on the eve of the 400 mile Salt March to Dandi, in March 1930, to protest against the salt tax instituted by British colonial rule. Part of the Indian Freedom Struggle, this march would culminate in Gandhi’s direct disobeying of the law that prohibited Indians from collecting, producing or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Reaching Dandi 24 days after he made this speech, Gandhi collected a small lump of natural salt out of the mud, for which he was arrested. Tens of thousands of supporters followed him in this act of defiance, leading to nationwide arrests.
Public Notice 2 has a universal and contemporary resonance, and was exhibited in the Hall of Nations in Washington DC in 2011. Every word of Gandhi’s rallying speech has been reimagined and recreated in a bone shaped alphabet. Placed on saffron yellow walls in blocks that resemble pages of a vast book, each letter asserts the speech’s importance.