Gudawer Kalirai Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1973 -

Born in 1973, Gudawer Kalirai has been awarded many prestigious commissions, been the recipient of awards for his photography and participated in exhibitions in London. His fascination with photography, the quality, and flexibility of the medium, led him to study Photography at the London University of Arts. Since graduating in 1995 Gudawer has experimented and developed his ideas through different styles of image making yet retained his initial attraction to the photographic image. Gudawer has completed numerous site-specific commissions creating large-scale works producing his work on surfaces such as aluminium, perspex and glass. For his public and private commissions Gudawer makes use of photographic techniques and devices to create digital artworks with a strong emphasis on layered imagery. By manipulating the colour, texture, light and shape of these layers he has developed techniques that allow him to enhance and develop his ideas, concepts, compositions, and subject matter without losing his initial attraction to it. Inspiration often comes through the development, experimentation and evolution of his work.

For his 'Reflection' commissions and work Gudawer explores and investigates how the construction of images and levels of transparency can evoke the illusion of space and our relationship to it.


Natural Forms. - The journey to the body of work seen here has evolved through personal projects that have led to an ongoing exploration and investigation into natural landforms. Images are shaped by the rhythms, moods, tensions and transient elements of somehow familiar, yet changing environments. Locations present forms and shape that create fascinating compositions and I am looking for unintentional symmetry, contradictions and making observations from random experience and interaction.

Trees and woodland in particular are reminiscent of fragmented memories and emotions. The constant changes that occur in the process of life, death, decay and evolution are ever apparent in my images and I find beauty in these transformations. My images capture a fragment in time, a fleeting temporary moment in the cycle of life and invite the viewer to understand the complexity of the environment and its natural power. In my work there is a fascination with natural landforms, an aesthetic craving along with a need for escape and a desire for understanding.

I explore our relationship to the natural landscape and ask what is so engaging about these sites? Is it the seductive beauty or is there a deeper emotional attachment we feel? In my work I discuss the experience of beauty and the pleasure of looking. I believe beauty is engraved deep in our minds and our relationship with natural surroundings is a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins that have fundamentally shaped our perception of beauty. Beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder but the experience of beauty with its emotional intensity and pleasure belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations and is an adaptive effect that we extend and intensify.

In an endeavour to understand how natural forms and shapes emerge I explore and discuss the relationship between chaos and order and the concept that chaos and pattern are built into nature’s most basic rules. The very same things that make natural forms appear unpredictable also allow it to create pattern and structure. Unthinking, simple rules have the power to create complexity from simplicity without any conscious thought. Self organised systems are everywhere in the natural world and it is this raw process that I am drawn to.