I want to extend the extremity of a material: Vanita Gupta

The artist’s mixed media works are on display at Kalakriti Art Gallery in Hyderabad

Artist Vanita Gupta’s debut solo show The Floating Cloud is a collection of her latest paintings, sculptures, installations and videos developed over two years. Currently displayed at Kalakriti Art Gallery in Hyderabad, they reflect her work in different media.

The title, The Floating Cloud, emerged out of a poem that she wrote in her mother tongue, Hindi. “I just put down my thoughts and then the title emerged from that.”

Her ink drawings have compelling and well-defined forms portraying a symmetrical balance on acid-free handmade paper. “My aesthetic is defined by precise and minimal forms. I don’t want to have an extra line in my work. I believe in an ardent need to create nothing more or less, allowing my forms to stay in an adequate and apt existence,” says the artist, who hails from Mumbai but is settled in Bengaluru. Speaking on the sense of movement and balance in her paintings, she says, “While I am in the creative process, the whole effort is to arrive at an indisputable finite form. My paintings are made from a single stroke, the brush does not leave the canvas unless the form is complete; there is no scope for correction. I feel like I am on the edge, like an acrobat who is trying to jump through a ring to catch hold of the rope. Even a little imbalance could be fatal.”

For someone who has always worked with black and white (“I feel they are strong, independent colours and stand on their own”) Vanita’s sculptures with a touch of gold have a hypnotic quality. She likes gold as a monolithic object. “I've tried to bring that sensibility to this show where solid gold objects intersect with my black forms. They seem to bring out the best in each other,” she says. Her foray into sculpture happened when she was sculpting with paper. “ I want to extend the extremity of material and explore it to its limits.”

In the gallery (The display is on till September 10) are mannequins draped beautifully in silk saris that she has painted andcreated exclusively for Kalakriti Art Gallery. Speaking of this ‘wearable art’, she says, “Each sari is a single edition and signed. I want the person who drapes it to feel that exclusivity. “

On her tryst with functional art, Vanita reveals she is moved by different materials and ‘tempted to try things. She had this ‘deep urge to transform her paintings into a drape” Calling it a natural journey that an artist goes through, she says, “The forms on these saris were first painted on a canvas. These paintings had a capacity for transformation. These floating forms on my canvas teased me at times, as if they wanted to walk out of my canvas and drape over me.” She did a lot of experimentation in textile printing technology to ‘study the kind of fabric her forms would like to adhere to’.