Artist Profile :: Anita Dube

21 January 2009

In partnership with Gallery Nature Morte, one of India’s premiere contemporary art spaces since 1997, Phillips de Pury & Company presents The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, featuring 10 of the most influential and soughtafter artists working in India and Pakistan. The exhibition opens in London on 26 November 2008 and in New York on 28 January 2009.

Through 15 December 2008:
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

From 28 January - 14 February 2009:
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street New York NY

Anita Dube juxtaposes organic and inorganic materials alongside found imagery and meticulously hand-crafted elements to create a body of objects which are at once familiar and foreign, inviting and foreboding. Dube frequently returns to concept of “skins,” fastidiously wrapping and covering objects, in this case covering gnarled tree roots in black velvet, as both a gesture of concealment and a comment on the forms of domesticity that have been traditionally assigned to women. In other works, the artist uses a zebra-striped velour to cover a hypothetical canvas and its frame, cutting words out of the center and lighting them from behind. In these works the words, which explore strategies of chance, become the pictorial content of the work and the light streaming through them gives the phrases a spiritual, other-worldly aura.

Anita Dube, Chance Piece A, 2008

Some of the artist’s earliest works used the ceramic and copper eyes that are made to be used on the statues of gods in Hindu temples. Dube frees these ciphers from their traditional moorings and groups them as insect-like swarms directly on the wall, in dense packs or configured “drawings.” With these works, Dube bridges the phantasmagorical creations of Hindu mythology with the politics of Surrealism, questioning psychological distinctions between East and West at the same time.

In Little Weapons of Defense, Dube constructs a free-standing “Jali” screen from leftover packing materials. Jali screens, which are typically heavily-ornamented and perforated stone screens found in Mughal buildings (the most famous examples being those in the Taj Mahal) are a venerated architectural component of Indian buildings and often involve years of painstaking craftsmanship to complete. Jalis both enclose space and keep it open to light and air, demarcate territory while keeping it porous. Using a wall made of Styrofoam packing material that has been bandaged and disguised, Dube places velvet-covered rocks in the nooks and crannies of the screen, where they function as both fetish objects and suggestive weapons.

The body of work included in this show is almost completely monochromatic exploring shades of blacks, grays and beiges, motivated by Dube’s preference: “I didn’t want colors to interfere with the conceptual process.” Her works employ found objects, recycled materials and discarded debris, confirming Dube’s statement that “Where I come from in India, we save everything, everything is re-used. The logic of capitalism is to have more, to have excess and therefore also to create more waste.”

Anita Dube lives and works in New Delhi, India. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com