Amrit Pal Singh’s Toy Face Tour comes to Bengaluru

Visual artist Amrit Pal Singh’s Toy Face Tour by Method and Hefty.art will be on display in Bengaluru’s Church Street Social from July 7-23.

If you ever thought dolls were for children, the Toy Face Tour which comes to Bengaluru this weekend, will have you changing your mind in a jiffy. Visual artist Amrit Pal Singh brings his latest collection of toy faces to the city after stops at Delhi and Mumbai.

Doll faces were a happy accident for Amrit. “I have been working in the design space for last the 12 years — from card games and t-shirts to publications and fin-tech apps. In 2020, I was working on a lot of illustrations and I crafted this style,” says the Delhi-based artist, adding, “I put out these illustrations titled Toy Faces on my socialsand they became a big hit.”

Soon enough, Toy Faces were getting picked up by members of the design and tech community worldwide. “I was licencing these illustrations and getting a lot of commissions too. The pandemic was underway and the idea of a digital identity was picking up steam; people also wanted to have a fun representation of themselves.”

“I wanted to create a series which was diverse. At that time, a lot of things were happening which impacted the art scene, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and since I was creating my work on a purely digital medium, it became popular in the tech community.”

Amrit says it was only in 2021, on someone’s suggestion that he tried Toy Faces as NFTs, not realising their success would skyrocket. “After a year of commissions and commercial projects, the popularity of the NFTs inspired me to transform my work into an art practice. I was making Toy Faces of those who inspired me; my first few faces — Frida and Van Gogh, my favourite artists — were auctioned and highly sought after. I began to focus on creating NFTs and was lucky enough to be discovered by a publication.”

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The Toy Face Tour marks the completion of Amrit’s 100th NFT, modelled on the late artist MF Husain. “I saw MF Husain in 2002 when I was in class IX. He had come to my school and while there sketched a piece that remained in our art room as an inspiration. I grew up looking at it and it was an honour to officially collaborate with his estate on this project. Similarly, the artist Amrita Sher Gill was a part of my life growing up in Delhi. A huge body of her works is on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, plus a road near my school is named after her. I ended up being fascinated by her life.”