Mahesh Baliga

Mahesh presents the world as he witnesses: his own time, the people who belong to this time, the resources one shares, a world where everyone is in it sometimes through metaphors and sometimes through a deadpan narration. The local, the small scale the eccentric and the ordinary finds a place in his work. He likes collecting and engaging with everyday objects. Discarded places, underdogs, simple acts of human life without any halos and parables throng the canvases. He often uses his own identity which  stands out against any ideas of singularity as it is seeped with histories of migration from Goa to Karnataka and then Baroda .The landscapes are thus not specific but overlays each other.

Present happenings of delight and disturbances appear. Images of seclusion, ageing, violence in any form; violence without categories are present. The images of the mundane: newspaper reports or the varied Indian visual traditions contribute to the imagining of the works. He tries to explore the chromatic potential of paint. The experiment often ranges from rendering of the colors to that of delving into the metaphorical aspect of color which can be traced to both the western and Indian tradition of painting. In the contemporary art practice colour had often been reduced to an aesthetic quality which undermines the narration but he tries to subvert and had thus chosen to paint with profuse colours to question the lopsided propelling of a certain kind of practice.

The recent works are in casein tempera in which he had experimented and probed into the varied application of the medium beyond the traditional methods and attempts to contemporarize it with other mediums.

His art practice reflects on different dilemmas and crisis of making an art object of two dimensionality and three dimensionality. Unpredictability of a medium offers him new challenges. He is a Gold medalist from C.A.V.A, Mysore and had completed post graduate diploma with distinction from M.S.U, Baroda. He had three solo shows at Project88 and has also exhibited at Rosenfeld gallery in Israel,XVA gallery in Dubai and Baikkong museum in Korea as well participated in various group exhibitions in India at Sandarbh, Oed, India art Fair and Art Chennai.

Download Artist CV