Nataraj Sharma

Baroda-based artist Nataraj Sharma presents new large-scale paintings and works on paper. Sharma's images are incisive commentaries on perception and experience. Both man and machinery, depicted in still, speculative portraits, are reduced to their vulnerable cores suggesting a caustic critique on ‘progress’. Barren, broody, yet visually dramatic, landscapes allude to the unpredictable confluence of nature, civilization and industrialization. Sharma captures this milieu by distilling complex processes to their essential elements.

With an impressively broad artistic range and vast visual vocabulary, Sharma creates large ruminative works in a unique and personal idiom. This language reveals an acute awareness and sensitivity to our rapidly changing environment and the socio-political implications of its transformation. As Peter Nagy suggests, Sharma “recognizes something anthropomorphic but also emotional in these machines, often abandoned to decay or arranged into what could be mistaken as social groupings. Both still life and landscape, these arrangements of machines prove to be opportune for displaying the painter’s skills of composition and rendering, his adroit perceptions of the play of light, and his deft sense of color.”

His unique, painterly style constructs iconic imagery with wit, precision and gravitas. In Construction One, for example, a building site is stripped down to expose its ghostlike inner core, in both a quiescent and defiant manner. The silhouette of man and machinery as they confront each other in a dimly lit room forms the subject of the painting Studio Karkhana. Similarly, small, blurry figures appear lost and indistinct against the dark and light hues of Playing Fields.

Born in Karnataka, India, Nataraj Sharma studied at the Baroda School of Art. The artist has had numerous international exhibitions. This is Mr. Sharma’s first solo exhibition in North America. He lives and works in Baroda, Gujarat.

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Nataraj Sharma