In this exciting first US solo-exhibition, Nicola Durvasula expands her already varied styles of drawing to include a performance in which a wall piece is perpetually altered. This showing follows her participation in a strongly received three-person exhibition at the gallery in Winter 2006.

Drawing inspiration from wide ranging, eclectic sources such as miniature painting, Kama Sutra illustrations, Western art history, and popular culture (both East and West); for Durvasula, emphasizing the intricacies of medium, structure and style is as important as the imagery itself. Ethnically abstracted humans float through the air in erotic embraces surrounded by annotations of philosophic ruminations and even a dead ant, which has been glued to the page.

Casting a light on the complexity of her work’s position, the performance belies the isolated and stable appearance of the individual drawings. The plans for the piece are conceived and explored in a draftsman fashion wherein the artist works on a table that has been set before the exhibition’s wall. Viewers are invited to consider the relationship between the artist’s process and product, her personal and professional identity and the crossing points of all four. Durvasula’s antipathy for the divisions that individuals maintain in order to provide themselves with identity is articulated through the never final nature of her work.

Ultimately, this is the statement which all of Durvasula’s delicate, figurative line drawings make; that separations and definitions are blurry and possess no definitive reality. Articulated with humor, a broad visual vocabulary and materiality, we are invited to enjoy work that, in its stillness, moves the boundaries of our appreciation to a fuller view.

Nicola Durvasula (b. 1960, Jersey, UK) has exhibited with important venues in India such as Gallery Chemould and Sakshi Gallery, both in Bombay; and with public and private venues in Europe and the US. Most recently her work was included in Lila/Play: Contemporary Miniatures and New Art from South Asia, Victoria, Australia, and exhibited at Rachmaninoff’s, London. Durvasula’s work is currently on view at
the Vanity Fair A-listed New British Painting and Works on Paper: Salon 2007 and at i fear, i believe, i desire curated by Gayatri Sinha, Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

Continuing her work with the Hijra (MTF transsexual/transgendered), the Bombaybased artist Tejal Shah presents to us a selection of small and large scale
photographs which elaborate the fantasies of individual members of this community. Ranging from the desire for children to inventive and complex Gardens of Eden, these dreamscapes reveal the unique consciousness of it’s subjects while playing with traditional Indian popular and fine art motifs. This presentation follows Shah’s critically well-received solo debut at the gallery in June, 2006 and coincides with the inclusion of a video work in “Global Feminism” at the Brooklyn Museum.