GARGI RAINA

Gargi Raina

Born in New Delhi in 1961, studied BFA in Applied Art from the Delhi College of Art & MFA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. Select listings of her solo exhibitions would include, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 1992, Some of her group shows include the ones at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, 2000, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2001, Vadhera Art Gallery, organized at Mumbai, 2003, Gallery Chemould’s 40th anniversary, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2003, Asian Cultural Center, New York, 2005.The artist lives and works in Baroda

Using gouache and dry pastels on paper and wood, Raina works in sequences which follow a narrative, linear in the way it reads but elastic in the way that it enables us to comprehend and examine - "I've been working with the idea of stretching time. It's like seeing something in slow motion or looking at one thing and stretching that time, being able to go backwards and forwards and doing it at a very, very slow pace. I think that has been very crucial to a lot of the work that I have been doing recently."

The objects and images, repeated with an almost mesmeric intensity, are taken from the repertoire of the domestic, though the essential equation arises out of their necessary persistence in our lives. Though simple in themselves, a transmutation occurs as the eye progresses from frame to frame, as does the potential for interpretation; moving "from an absence to a presence - from a hole to a mountain, a navel to a breast until it becomes a spinning top". Certain symbols emerge, obvious in some ways but potent in that they form the basis of collective memory; myths of creation and origin unfolding with movement in time or with the action being performed.

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