The Drifters: price list

The Drifters: price list

price list

• Ruchin Soni
  
  Stage – 4’x 4’ – Rs 50,000
  
  Life - 4’x 4’ – Rs 50,000
  
  Silver Bells – 3’ x 3’ – Rs 40,000
  
  Last Supper – 5’ x 5’ – Rs 80,000
  
  Burden – 3’ x 3’ – Rs 40,000
  
  
  
  
  
  Nidhi Khurana
  
  Majra – 4’ x 4’ – 50,000
  
  Jantar Mantar – 4’ x 4’ – Rs 50,000
  
  Nasreen 1 – – 35,000
  
  Nasreen 2 – – 55,000
  
  A View From My
  Storeroom Window - - Rs 35,000
  
  (left) Rajpur – 3’ x 3’ – Rs 45,000
  
  
  
  
  
  Aditi Chitre
  
  One OD 3 Times Daily – 4’ x 5’6” – Rs 45,000
  
  Disco net – 5’.6” x 4’ – RS 45,000
  
  Longevity - 5’.6” x 4’ – RS 45,000
  
  
  
  

Drifters Photo Gallery

Ruchin Soni alias Hiralal

'Life' oil on canvas with silver foil.
size- 3x3



The current body of works come at a stage of Ruchin's life when both he and his artistic practice are going through a transformation, yet catching him at a moment when age comibining with his masculinty urges him to 'settel down'. the works mirror the anxieties of his experience...imagining/living life savouring experiences...growing but somewhere trapped. Pictorally he has settled into a visual scape...playing with the compositional complexities offered by his peculiar human form..and his love for silver+gold foil work together with their oxidising properties.

one thing that seperates ruchin from many artits i know is his natural knack for by passing art history. dealing with a theme like 'last supper' or the iconography of the 'burden' does not pre meditae his conceptualizations. this refusal to fall under the 'tyranny of knowledge' and yet experience...articulate 'Life' is what gives him and his art their 'freshness'. 'The Last Supper' is simply an memory painted...a dear last dinner with a friend.

one may notice that in spite of all their freedom and fluidity Ruchin's males get trapped within their frames ...looking out...pushing out...yet trapped. Compositionally it layers the works with a 'twist' ...making one smile with his formal play. Also even within a relatively small body of works....there is a refusal to settel down, to be forever on the edgy/experipentative mode is always going to be there.
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'Stage' oil on canvas with silver foil. size- 3x3




Burden- oil on canvas with silver foil. size- 4x4





Holding on to wisdom- oil on canvas with silver foil. Size- 4x4






Silver Bells.- oil on cavnas with silver foil. size- 4x4

With Friends Oil on canvas with Silver foil. Size- 5x5

The Last Supper- Oil on canvas with Silver foil. Size- 5x5

One of the early struggles for Ruchin in his artistic journey was to forget his prodigious talent. A hereditary engagement with traditional painting for the Swaminarayan sect ensured that Ruchin threatened to stumble on his own codified visual language as he began his formal journey into fine arts. From then on it has been a story of 'learning to forget' and 'learning to control’. Tracing such pressures to be conscious about his style right from his early years as a student.

Had it not been for his untamed imagination Ruchin Soni would have headed straight into lifeless stagnated visual vocabulary? But, his unfounded desire to express his experiantialities...to push his skill to the limit through experimentation...and his refusal to 'forsake' his traditional background, (in an attempt to chase a new contemporary) has been the driving force behind Ruchin's artistic practice.
Over the years Ruchin has lucidly amalgamated his background, the exposure to contemporary (coming through his thick hard years at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University Baroda.) and all that he has learnt and unlearned. A fascination to re-understand /articulate his masculinity, a continuous re-visitation of the spiritual and a refusal to settle into a definable narrative mode are the easily definable characteristics of Ruchin's work. It is the manner in which these elements combine to inform and layer his narrative impulses that leads one to be enchanted by the 'frames' Ruchin conjures up.
There is a certain focus on the male figure...often they are cast in contextual voids, large and looming...dominant yet trapped within the woodwork of the frame. Ruchin is one of the few artists who use the 'frame' as a complimentary extension of the surface. His enchanting draftsmanship allows Ruchin to bend and twist his 'objects of representation’, creating form, which are idealised, romanticised, yet brutalised.
A lot of this comes from his training with conjuring images of divinity, but the love and the anguish are straight from his lived experience.

Ruchin Soni is a painter, based in Deradun, currently enjoying an artistic sabbatical with his wife teaching art at the Welham Girls’ School, Dehradun

Aditi Chitre

'Disco-nnet' 4x5.5 feet. oil on canvas


will be a bit of an exazaration to call this a body of works, but that is Aditi's practice for you. heavy concentrated imageries...often disturbing...exaust her too much to do a series in the traditinal sense. these set of three paintings are a persolnal release/reaction from sever bouts of illness and a resultant tryst with antibiotics and feeling "fucked" by 'scientific medication' :)

Aditi has always benn a fan of 'horror' as a genre...and though presently she seeks to move away from it...'horror' seems to have left a permanert imprint on her imagination...but one must note it is an engagement with horror...yet working outside the 'loudness' with which it is mostly associated. Combining horror with her flair to exploit colours in their pale freshness...aditi plays with 'viewing angels' to create three captivating paintings citiqueing certain theoritical 'key staones' of Science and medicine.

she has not read Susane Sontages commentries on illness...but she pocesss the intellectual skill to generate an experiential critiqe...and (yet) the critique being able to project larger concers. of course the first thing that strikes you is the element of curious visuality. which is nice...it engages the mind...tantalizes it...invites it to enter the work. and then beyond a point the artiost's fromal concers take over...playing with reds greens pinks and their paleness...and their perpective planes. tried hard to coax her to contribute one large drawing.... just did not happen :(


'Disco-nnet' in the gallery space





1 O.D 3 times daily , 5.5x4 feet, Oil and Hair on Canvas



'Longetivity', 4x5.5 feet. oil on canvas



Detail of ' 1 O.D 3 times daily , 5.5x4 feet, Oil and Hair on Canvas





















Prepatory drawing for 'Longetivity'

Prepatory drawing for Disco-nnet



Hate, love, love, love, hate, hate…seems like that might actually be able to define Aditi Chitre’s engagement with her art. The only stabilizing factor is that Aditi has not been indifferent. Having strong disagreements with the manner in which art is ‘consumed’ she has veered into animation and documentary filmmaking, also freelancing in graphic design. What keeps getting Aditi Chitre interested in painting is the sheer joy of mixing colours, applying paint on canvas, charcoal on paper…basically as simple as that.

What makes her art captivating is the ‘Van Goghian’ ability to bring out a ‘haunting’, often tormented essence in her forms. Right from her childhood, for Aditi, drawing and painting have always been mediums of expressing her experiential anguish(s). Often her art expresses her social hypersensitivity. At a time when most will look and move on, Aditi stops, notices and gets affected. What makes her so special is that her art is so ‘personal’ and yet it is so often ‘bursting with politics’.

Formally what one notices in her works is the obvious delight she gets in drawing and her ability to arrive at colours, which have a matt, pale freshness. Moreover Aditi has always resisted ‘training’. Hence even after spending four years in the department of painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda, her language still remains ‘difficult to digest’ by certain institutionalized understanding of painting. It is tempting to think that the artist gets some conscious joy out of this ‘resistance’. Even while reacting to the most morbid of realities/experiences, Aditi’s paintings don’t lapse into a morbid catharsis. It is her incredible understanding of ‘the humorous’ that perforates her representation and layers it with an alternative aesthetics. It is through this introduction of humour that the artist unwittingly expresses her dissatisfaction with Van Gogh. This ‘introduction of humour’ as an artistic strategy has driven Aditi to experiment with the language of caricature. However it is a caricature that the artist had to play out in oil paint thereby facing a collision between medium and style. This struggle to represent caricature within an institutionalized understanding of painting is definitive of Aditi’s artistic struggle from her student days on. Her encounters with graphic design and animation have enabled her to loosen out her style. Yet more significantly they have expanded the artist’s understanding of the possibilities of artistic practice. Very clearly painting is a medium that Aditi will never be confined to but maybe never let go of.

Aditi Chitre is a Painter/ Animation Artist based in Mumbai, she also does freelance story boarding and enjoys foraying into graphic design to constantly push her own understanding of art.

Nidhi Khurana alias Champa

Majra and Jantar Mantar displayed as a dyptch


Nidhi is the 'mistress of intimacy'...it her her 'eye' that enables her to be constantly in love with her lived enviroment...to be able to see 'beauty' in shapes places and objects in a manner that has elemens of experintial narratives. the current body of works are layered montages of visual scapes and objects that have held imagination+fantasy over the last 'period'. Majra is a parrot she kept as a pet...but let go when she realised that the bird 'really' wanted to fly out. the bhu bus is the stable mode of transport in Deradoon and Jantar Mantar comes after a visit to Rajasthan.

after a long time it is refreshing to come across a painter who is engaged in simply painting her surroundings...observing them with an feminine intimacy...yet staying away from the political. Nidhi enjoys colours a lot...muddy earthy...yet fresh and pure. So after a point she just 'takes off'... playing around with the colours and the surface...combining techniques...mediums...and imaginations. though all this her flair for patters come out...the tail light of the blue bus in 'Majra'...the lights showing a village on a hill..the flowers and leaves arranged in the 'Nasreen' series. (yet) through her sensibility for pattern...Nidhi sometimes (often) introduces an (mechanical) architectural grid...opening up a whole new semantic direction.

Pricing some of her small format works more than her larger works just because they are precious....that is Nidhi Khurana for you



A view from my window, Oil and Mixes Media on board


Majra, Oil and mixed media on board 4x4 feet




Jantar Mantar, Oil and Mixed Media on Board


















Nasreen1 Mixed Media on Board,

















Nasreen 2 Mixed Media on Board























Rajpur Oil and Mixed Media on board


As a sculpture student she struggled to introduce colors and feminity in a department still dominated by a masculine definition of art and sculpture. One could not help but her engagement with the ‘playful’ and with colors even as her tutors disapproved. Frustrated by ‘Sculpture’ when she chased ceramics she got engrossed in the various possibilities of glazing…and got lost in the intricacies of it. From the onset one always knew her true calling was painting, but maybe Nidhi had to have her encounters with the alternatives to realize what painting meant to her and why she just had to paint. When one tries to articulate what are the key elements that define Nidhi’s pictorial practice, her engagement with the intimate, the desire to ‘play’ with the Form, and purely intuitive engagement with colors are the visible elements that come to mind. However what truly (can it be falsely?) gives aesthetic value to her works is the connection between Nidhi’s 'Personal' and her works. The connection does not come out of a concentrated effort to pitch the private within a larger discursive terrain, rather it comes from no effort at all, it is just a simple lucid flow, unpretentious and mirrors a certain kind of intimacy characteristic of her practice.


Staying and working from Dehradun allows Nidhi the kind of space away from the disciplinary mainstream which she has always wanted/needed to be able to explore her language in intimate isolation…as a tool to work in the margins of mainstream vocabularies. Her paintings are intimate not only because of the objects’ vision-scapes, but (and maybe more) because of them being vehicles of her ’independent’ ‘playful’, yet ‘soft’ spirit. They mirror the kind of ‘feminity’ Nidhi lives, without her realizing how much her paintings communicate about herself. Lately she has shown a certain tendency to ‘formalize’ her approach, however the inherent independence is so strong that any amount of conscious ‘disciplining’ never really sits on her. Nidhi’s understanding and handling of colors sit on the margins of being unconventional, but sometimes they definitely come out as untamed, at their most subdued times Nidhi’s use of colors are still breezy playful and at the same time communicate her relationship with her objects’ vision-scapes.

Her first show in Bombay/Mumbai presents a body of works made at a time when she feels finally settled into painting and show a certain confidence with articulation of semiotic and ‘formal’ values. Characteristically the artist ‘does not really care’…caring about reception is simply not her style …if it were the entire journey would have just not begun.

Nidhi Khurana is a painter, based in Deradun, currently enjoying an artistc sabbatical with her husband teaching art at the Welham Girls’ School, Dehradun

Introducing 'Drifters' : about the show

‘The Drifters’ will temporary anchor in Artist Center Ador House, K Dubash Marg, Mumbai between the 8th-14th Jan 2007. The show presents three young, talented, brave practitioners of painting who have worked on the fringes of art institutions to evolve personalized expressions which are intimate, sensitive and yet (sometimes) political. The artist were near contemporaries at the Faculty of Fine arts, MS University of Baroda, and have over the years have grown to appreciate and support each other’s artistic practice….it was only natural that they would Drift and anchor together. Ruchin Soni alias Hiralal, Nidhi Khurana alias Champa and Aditi Chitre are painters who’s enthrall, captivate and enchant by being able to generate intuitive poetry while expressing their personal mythologies/journeys and anxieties…and needless to say they are the ‘Drifters’.

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this is a small modest attempt at presenting three young artists, through an independent curation. initially it was tempting to approach a few galleries and go for a (gala) sponsored show...but somehow it was not in sync with how we wanted to present ourselves. as an practicing critic i have been engaged with the possibility of imagining 'new platforms' for artists...and in a sense 'the drifters' has become an extension of that quest. Curatorially it is an experiment around the possibility of presenting/showcasing artists by working on the edges of an increasingly standardised exhibition concept.
at the end nothing drastically new is happening, yet three new artists are being launched who being on the fringes of the discipline always shared a visibility crisis. making a choice to introduce the Drifters in Mumbai in this manner is the curatorial input...also an urge to see what happens to an art show if it presented 'low budget' small scale'...and a bit of imagination.

Please click on the folowing links...hope you manage to catch the show...and hope you like it.

-Nidhi Khurana alias Champa

-Aditi Chitre

-Ruchin Soni alias Heera

-Price List

-Photo Gallery

Thanks

Rahul Bhattacharya