For Frieze London, our booth transforms into an immersive, painterly, and estranged forest: earthy, fleshy hues gather and collide within a hypnotic canvas; the tangibility of wood turns fluid with inlay; ceramic wildflowers curve open amidst a violent inferno; a sliced, aged tree bark exposes a surreal matrix of wounds; haunting, disembodied spectres of bronze linger at liminal edges; whereas crumbling impastos and lightning strokes of pigment bear witness to the throes of monsoon in Maharashtra. Each artwork deliberately reckons with ecopoetics: thinking through the tenuous (and ever political) relation between the human and non-human — be it our lived surroundings, an unassuming backyard, precarious shelters of migrants, recurring wildfires in California, or an unruly, swerving rainfall in a rural field. Out here, nature is no longer externalised (or romanticised) into a passive entity of the Anthropocene, but rather, a vital force complicit in our web of life.
Amitesh Shrivastava’s Backyard, a four-panel canvas, maps a sensorial adventure: subjects and objects disappear and emerge, as the horizon — much like our psyche — remains unstable, inscrutable, and constantly on the move. Predators and prey are no longer fixed positions, but fluctuate, as the artist distils our ways of seeing, focusing on the ceaseless movement of light, sound, and the constellations of an image. The figures that populate these scenes are not premeditated in drawing or preparatory sketch. Shrivastava renders them directly on the canvas surface in oils. In this work, the textures of emotion and memory across time — his recollections of a distant, fraught childhood — is embodied through colour: beginning with daylight, its luminous contours, but in each repetitive panel, slowly turns to dusk, echoing darker hues, insidious and raw.
In contrast, Mahesh Baliga's painterly works take a narrative turn; in his distinct oeuvre, Baliga instils quotidian and often overlooked moments with an uncanny emotional resonance. He unravels the contradictory textures that make up our worlds — oscillating between the real and the imagined, an object and its semantic (or aesthetic) possibilities. There's a constant play — or perhaps, a visual trap — between our gaze and the painted surface, which remains elusive but deeply compelling. In Baliga's new series of intricate inlay works, the materiality of wood becomes more than a metaphor: its grained texture renders tangible a fleeting sensation of fear, and its contingency holds a self portrait of the artist, caught in the act of making.
Amol K Patil dissects movement from a corporeal, bodily perspective. He thinks through the gestures implicit in labour-intensive routines of migrant workers; and in his compositions, these movements are isolated, fragmented, and dislocated. At the edge of a polluted industrial fog, a tense foot begins to crawl, or a muscular arm appears to twitch. On a towering mound of waste, a male head emerges. Despite their stillness, the artist instills a rare spectrality into these bronze sculptures; banal gestures are subverted into haunting presences, infused with Patil’s radical imaginary of resistance.
Taking a poetic and otherworldly approach to materiality, Hemali Bhuta rediscovers an aged, flawed, bark of a tree from Panjim, Goa. Extending her recursive (and rigorous) engagement with nature, the artist rethinks temporality through entropy — introducing the intangible quality of time into a site-specific sculpture. Here, she draws our gaze into a wound, an ‘opening to the inside’, infused with possibilities of delicate healing through beeswax. This bruised surface is now activated and resurrected to a second life; for in the words of the mystic poet Kabir, it is the wound - a mark of friction - that sparks a fire.
Both Ashwini Bhat and Claire Baker tap into the precarious, unpredictable, and relentless crux of nature. Baker captures the moment of contact between living matter — her own body and the stone pigments slipping into line — through her process of durational immersion. She paints her embodied experience of the monsoon cycle: from parched land to wet constancy, to faded dry, and then wetness again. In these works, temporality is no longer linear, but twists, loops, and slows down, before catching an unexpected pace; each movement distilled through the oscillations and textures of light, paint, and the artist’s own body.
Ashwini Bhat’s Post-fire Superbloom sculptures are inspired from her experiences of wildfires in California: an integral part of the region’s ecology, these infernos of vast destruction simultaneously trigger the germination and spread of many plant species. In turn, the landscape witnesses an uncanny ‘superbloom’, a phenomenon wherein a multitude of wildflowers bloom in a short period. Bhat’s visceral, haptic, and textured ceramic forms embody this logic of regeneration; her colour palette alludes to the charred and burnt earth in the aftermath of a forest fire. But the motif of a calla lily recursively emerges, which for the artist, is a symbol of the resilient (female) body.
