Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember

Name: Mahesh Baliga
Start: 2022-04-12
End: 2022-05-28
Location: David Zwirner

“My paintings remind me why I remember something while looking at something else. My works contain the experience of looking. The curiosity of looking at a person, a person in a particular condition. Existences mingle; the animals, the trees, and objects in my paintings may tell human stories.”
—Mahesh Baliga

David Zwirner is pleased to present Drawn to remember, an exhibition of new paintings by Indian artist Mahesh Baliga, on view in The Upper Room at the gallery’s London location. This will be Baliga’s first solo exhibition outside of India.

Baliga documents the intricacies of life in western India, instilling quotidian and often overlooked moments with emotional resonance. Fascinated by the relationship between a painting’s formal construction and its psychological effect, the artist slips seamlessly between the real and the imagined, developing surreal visual interventions that convey the poignant and strange nature of memories, personal loss, and the passage of time.

Read the artist’s full exhibition statement

Image: Mahesh Baliga, Flowering self, 2022 (detail)

Location

24 Grafton Street London

Dates

April 12—May 28, 2022

Artist

Mahesh Baliga

Press Release

Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember

All must be remembered:
a turning wind, the threads
in the threadbare event must be gathered,
yard after yard of all we inhabited,
the train’s long trajectory,
and the trappings of sorrow.

—Pablo Neruda, excerpt from “Memory”

Installation view, Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember, David Zwirner, London, 2022

Baliga at work in his studio, 2022. Photo by Suguresh Sultanpur

Fascinated by the relationship between a painting’s formal construction and its psychological effect, Mahesh Baliga slips seamlessly between the real and the imagined, developing surreal visual interventions that convey the poignant and strange nature of memories, personal loss, and the passage of time.

Mahesh Baliga

Eye hospital, 2022

Casein on canvas

37 5/8 x 49 5/8 inches (95.7 x 126 cm)

“Things, people, places exist in a stream of never forgetting; they arrive in the loneliness of my studio. One re-sees the things one saw. With the quickly vanishing images in rushes, one tries to collect and keep them safe, to go back to them and recall them. My paintings remind me why I remember something while looking at something else. My works contain the experience of looking. The curiosity of looking at a person, a person in a particular condition. Existences mingle; the animals, the trees, and objects in my paintings may tell human stories.”

—Mahesh Baliga

Mahesh Baliga

Male papaya tree, 2022

Casein on board

25 x 17 inches (63.6 x 43.3 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Pagla gach, 2022

Casein on board

25 x 17 inches (63.6 x 43.3 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Safe place, 2022

Casein on canvas

37 5/8 x 49 3/4 inches (95.6 x 126.2 cm)

The artist populates his canvases with a recurring reel of characters and settings: the verdant surroundings of his outdoor painting studio, the ink-stained shirt of a poet, the artist’s late mother with her hands pressed together in prayer.

Mahesh Baliga

Reception, 2022

Casein on board

11 x 13 inches (28.1 x 33.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Prayer, 2022

Casein on board

13 x 11 inches (33.1 x 28.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga, Reception, 2022 (detail)

Installation view, Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember, David Zwirner, London, 2022

Born in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka, Mahesh Baliga has cultivated a body of painted work that explores the range of human emotion and perception. Today, he lives and works in Vadodara, India, where he documents with emotional resonance quotidian and often overlooked moments.

Baliga working on a painting on a ledge in his studio, 2021. A still from a video by Sashikanth Thavudoz

A mortar and pestle Baliga uses to grind rough pigments and a measuring spoon in Baliga’s studio, 2022. Photo by Mahesh Baliga

Over the years, Baliga has developed the use of casein tempera—a quick-drying paint derived from milk protein—in paintings of all sizes. Though the artist has described his chosen medium as unpredictable, Baliga deliberately incorporates this mutability into his painting practice. “Traditionally, the colour is made earlier and these things are arranged before the painting is begun,” explains Baliga. “But I don’t do that. I mix the colours as I am painting.... It’s as if I start with a premonition of how things will go, but the feeling world of the painting has its own language, which will not listen to my predictions. This means that you have to initiate a dialogue with the colour.”

Mahesh Baliga

Flowering self, 2022

Casein on board

13 x 11 inches (33.1 x 28.1 cm)

“Caring as an idea often comes as a mainstay—there is a fear of not being able to attend to the pain of others. Sometimes things happen and there is a regret of not acting right at that time and there is a desire to undo things; I reimagine situations like I wish them to be. I want to keep a close watch on my loved ones, there is a fear of losing them. But the condition of time only permits me to work on it mentally. The present time has made me forget how to greet and meet the people as earlier. An act which was right for one moment fails in another moment.”

—Mahesh Baliga

Mahesh Baliga

Aveek cutting nails, 2022

Casein on board

11 1/8 x 13 inches (28.2 x 33.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga, Aveek cutting nails, 2022 (detail)

“[Looking at Mahesh’s paintings] was like learning to read auto-fiction—neither fully autobiography nor fully fiction—made by a generous but subtle and elusive writer for whom the reinvention of characters and situations, the retelling of dreams and myths, and allusion to other artists and their work were constitutive of the mystery, veracity and labour inherent in the actual making of images.”

—Aveek Sen, writer and curator

Mahesh Baliga

Poet with ink on his pocket, 2022

Casein on board

13 1/8 x 11 inches (33.2 x 28.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Banana Branch, 2022

Casein on board

24 7/8 x 17 1/8 inches (63.1 x 43.5 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Anniversary, 2022

Casein on board

11 1/8 x 13 inches (28.2 x 33.1 cm)

A number of “lap-sized” paintings, as the artist calls them, will be on view. Baliga arrived at the smaller format as a way to continue his practice as a painter while commuting back and forth from Surat, India, where for several years he held a teaching position at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University. Also on view will be a selection of larger paintings, which continue the artist’s characteristic and sustained observation of day-to-day life.

Installation view, Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember, David Zwirner, London, 2022

Mahesh Baliga

Remembering Christo, 2022

Casein on board

11 1/8 x 13 inches (28.2 x 33.1 cm)

“There is always a negotiation between the act of making and what I feel. The small scale gives both the artist and the viewer a sense of intimacy, it creates a kind of nearness to the things that are distant. The experiences of a cold ice cream and an airy day, how to paint those sensations and translate them visually. The things one can’t have anymore have turned up as sensations. Something which you savoured physically is being tasted, ruminated through senses, and turned into a different plane of material: the paints.”

—Mahesh Baliga

Mahesh Baliga

Timepass, 2022

Casein on board

11 x 13 inches (28.1 x 33.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Diversion, 2022

Casein on board

11 1/8 x 13 inches (28.2 x 33 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Coffin Maker, 2022

Casein on canvas

49 3/4 x 73 5/8 inches (126.2 x 187 cm)

“Painting enables Baliga to straddle serious subjects, banality, and deliberate humour while exploring the structures of visuality.… His works that are exhibited like a series do not construct a linear narrative, but instead portray various kinds of reversals, contradictions, references to time, and ideas of intertextuality.”

—Pooja Savansukha, The Hindu

Mahesh Baliga

Dream, 2022

Casein on board

13 x 11 1/8 inches (33.1 x 28.2 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Reader, 2022

Casein on board

11 x 13 inches (28.1 x 33.1 cm)

Mahesh Baliga

Trees Whisper to each other whether we want roots, 2022

Casein on canvas

61 5/8 x 85 3/4 inches (156.6 x 217.7 cm)

Mahesh Baliga, Trees Whisper to each other whether we want roots, 2022 (detail)

Installation view, Mahesh Baliga: Drawn to remember, David Zwirner, London, 2022

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