All my life, I have stayed away from buying established artists. To buy their work, all you need is money. When you do that, you do not employ the three things that I think are critical in buying art: your eye, your intuition, your self-confidence. And I buy a lot of youngsters. Because very few people have the courage and conviction to buy them. Plus, I have two teenagers at home. And because all the art we have will ultimately be theirs, I buy the technology of the times. I like computer-interactive art. I adore kinetics. Dig video art and love sound installations. Plus, I like fearless artists who play with media. I like big, hairy, audacious artists. Now, I must confess that I am not an art academic. I don’t care what the work is titled. I just like it.
Here are four artists that I am terribly excited about.
Vir Kotak
I like Vir’s work because it is geometric. Plus, Vir experiments like a fiend. He takes toothpicks and then projects them onto a screen and then shoots images. He juxtaposes images on already finished artworks. He is undisciplined, irreverent. His lines are clean and then, sometimes, blurred, He creates work that is 10″x 10″. And he also creates structures that are 20 feet high. The lack of method in his madness is very seductive to me.
Savia Mahajan
Vir introduced me to this cool gallery called TARQ. And that is how I saw the work of Savia Mahajan. She works with ceramics, manganese dioxide and iron oxide, which she then fires. I like the idea of a chemical process contributing to the creation of a piece of art. And I find deep refinement in the rawness of her work.
Farah Mullah
Farah’s work combines sensors with kinetics. I like how she creates sound using the wind and how she marries complex narratives.
Ayesha Singh
I like the scale of Ayesha’s work, and marvel at how she uses scaffolding as art. Her employment of columns etc is truly fantastic. Her large digital prints of cloth are expansive and energetic. Her work is large, unfettered yet vastly beautiful.
What binds these artists? What is that common spine that runs through their sensibilities and work. I think they are all bumble bees. Because aerodynamically speaking, the bumblebee cannot fly. But the bumblebee doesn’t know that. So it flies.
