New Delhi-based Shanti Dave is primarily a modernist whose concerns have remained the use of the medium in ways that lend textural quality and gravitas to his work. His training in East Asian calligraphy is reflected in the tablets with meticulously fabricated scripts, which, in this Untitled work, are placed in aggregates that lend movement to the amorphous mass thus created, evoking a sense of a leviathan message streaming into the present from the past. Blue and beige tablets rise away from the rest of the aggregate like the mast of a ship, directing fragmented memories in a red and green sea.
published references
Singh, Kishore, ed., Indian Abstracts: An Absence of Form (New Delhi: DAG, 2014), p. 149 Singh, Kishore, ed., Manifestations XI | 75 Artists, 20th Century Indian Art (New Delhi: DAG, 2014), p. 212 Singh, Kishore, ed., A Visual History of Indian Modern Art, Volume Six: A Modern Vernacular (New Delhi: DAG, 2015), p. 1053
Shanti Dave
Untitled
1968
Encaustic and oil on canvas
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Shanti Dave
Untitled
1968
Encaustic and oil on canvas
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