Counter Gaze by Shruti Gupta Chandra

 Those who have followed the artist's oeuvre will be pleasantly surprised to note the marked turn in her paintings. While she continues to work on large size canvases articulating her concern about human life within fast growing urban spaces, she has moved away from her earlier indulgence with the homo-centric figurative language to create a far more abstract pictorial language using an intricate pattern of grids and staircases.

Hence, urban spaces, their importance as an aspirational desire, the human angst they create and the fact that they are slowly but aggressively taking over rural spaces is what forms the core of Shruti's work. Faced with loneliness due to rapid breakdown of relationships in an urban space, Shruti's protagonist searches for sustenance. Added to this, is the strange amalgam of the old and new - the erosion of all that one held sacred - values, principles, ideals - by the Online Kunstgalerie  of a brittle brightness. We build 'castles in the air', 'we hope to find', 'we wait, we believe'... But despite all this, he is not just a victim. He has an inner intrinsic strength that enables him to cope and sustain, and also hope.

What is also visually arresting in this new body of work is how the artist has used 'grids' to deconstruct existing realities. Unlike in her earlier works, she builds a lot of grids on her pictorial space so that a viewer can negotiate her reality in both an aesthetic and philosophical way.

One can also find Shruti's involvement with the beauty of the human body in most of these works too, although considerably moderated and muted. While she has chosen to now create visual planes of abstract color schemes, she incorporates solidly drawn male human figures but distorted to some extent to emphasize the feeling of dislocation of these human beings.

Says Ashwini Pai Bahadur, Director, Artspeaks India: "For the last decade or so I have been an admirer of Shruti's paintings through several avatars as collector, buyer, admirer and critic and hence it was the natural choice to host her solo show for the gallery's launch exhibition. Her non conformist subjects and technical brilliance make the same urban jungle where we have both met an endearing piece of art."

Says Shruti Gupta Chandra: "While it is obvious that urbanisation is undertaken for the welfare of human beings, we also can't doubt that it often contributes to their suffering. It is this irony of human existence that I have tired to capture in my work."