Art Alive presents ‘In other rooms’, a solo show of Tara Sabharwal. Tara’s watercolour’s and prints reflect upon the vicissitudes of her own life. Her imagery also strives to elucidate some of the complexities of the modern human condition.
Tara Sabharwal hails from Delhi and is now based in Manhattan, New York. She left India after completing her graduation at MS University, Baroda in 1980 to pursue an advanced degree at the Royal College of Art, London. Over a career that spans 30 plus years, she has been showing her works in India, USA, UK and Germany.
Her paintings are uniquely individual, intensely personal and yet entirely open to the world. Tara says “My paintings are remembered moments from a journey of outward and inner explorations.” Art critic Yehuda Safran writes, “Such a degree of inner self-regard, or inner dialogue, is as rare as it is difficult. It is solipsistic, on one hand, and totally open to the world on the other hand, all at once; at the same time it represents something perfectly communicable and totally opaque. In such dream-like states, we regain complete autonomy. This sovereign autonomy is the essence of Tara Sabharwal's paintings”.
Tara’s works are so near to each other thematically and in their subject matter and yet they are so different from each other as the particularity of each canvas gives it a reading all of its own. As if this very language has to be reborn each time, has to be always at the beginning again.
According to Andy McCord, New York based writer “Tara’s human figures are put through permutations and changes in relation to each other, played like phrases in music. They are distinct at one moment, seeming biological, even autobiographical. In another—or from another angle—they are merging, spectral emanations of spirit or mood.”
In Tara’s work one sees a palette of earth and sky and everything in between intimately and closely related to our possible experience of color in the world. Her use of color gives painting the quality of crystals, mineral layers of earth, water and air. In Tara’s pictures the air itself is to be felt in all the other elements. Artist Zarina Hashmi feels “Colour is essential to her practice as an artist, in her new body of work the exuberance of colours gives a vitality to organic forms.”
Tara creates small miniature type of watercolours, oils, drawings and mixed media pieces. Her works, based on a fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, show the influences not only from Indian mythology but also from European artists such as Much, Redon and Chagall, Bosch and Goya.
