Lot 23: Abir Karmakar , Untitled oil on canvas

signed 'Abir/ 06' on reverse oil on canvas

measurements 72 1/4 by 90 in. alternate measurements 183.5 by 228.5 cm.

Interiors , Galerie Heike Curtze, Berlin, September-October 2006

executed 2006
Baroda-based artist Abir Karmakar's Interiors V is a part of a suite of six paintings titled Interiors. The collection marks Karmakar's second solo exhibition; From My Photo Album (2005) was the first. Although Karmakar employs photo-realism - a style much favored by contemporary Indian artists - his paintings distinguish themselves with their complexity and with the artist's reluctance to capitulate to quick-fix resolutions such as paintings made by diligently tracing projected images. Mumbai-based art critic and curator, Kamala Kapoor, writes in the catalogue accompanying Interiors, 'There is a consuming disquiet to the artist's observations of ordinary human behavior that has to be first hand, an emotional frisson and eroticism to his choice and placement of everyday objects that sets a personal narrative in motion. It takes a certain courage to give the protagonist one's own face. The painter's anxiety-ridden realism is daring.' The idiosyncratic universe occasioned by Karmakar's practice, revels in dousing oil on complications. On first viewing, Interiors V may appear to toe the line and offer the viewer a warmly lit episode of familial concord. But to the steady gaze, the painting reveals its cipher-like character. This happens in part because Karmakar continues to remain transfixed by the seductiveness of the middle ground, be it androgyny or a general overarching sense of ambivalence. Karmakar ploughs this fecund ground to excavate dramas of personal and/or projected narratives. In the painting, the finely honed interiors of the apartment preside over a scene of peculiar domesticity. Karmakar enters the situation as an onlooker. The subject of the onlooker's attention is, however, the focal point of this satisfyingly multivalent visual conundrum. Dressed in pink underwear, the eminently flat-chested feminine face of the artist could be his female doppelganger. Except that the thickset figure is seen bending clumsily over a copy of the Material Man. And therein lies the rub. A collection of essays edited by Giannino Malossi, Material Man, examines masculinity as encountered in the burgeoning media scenario. The book, which has partially nudged its way into the right hand corner of the painting, is a very telling inclusion. Its presence throws open the vignette, carefully embellished with things quotidian - a remote control, a dog and a few seemingly lethargic paintings. Is the artist, in fact, lovingly observing a transgender self? Voyeurism is one of the key gravitational pulls binding Karmakar's pictorial researches. In Interiors V, voyeurism is a many-faced, tantalizing anomaly. The artist at his easel is the voyeur who triggers it all and the male protagonist dwelling in his painting is an eager spectator as well. The relay concludes with the viewers, who from their privileged positions live vicariously even as they attempt to tease out the answers. (Gitanjali Dang, Mumbai, July 2007). Gitanjali Dang is art critic of the Hindustan Times, Mumbai.