Portrait of Mahesh Baliga, 2022. Photo: Manish Mehta. © Mahesh Baliga, courtesy the artist, Project 88, and David Zwirner.
There is a quiet strangeness to the work of Mahesh Baliga (b1982, Karnataka, India), a stillness that hints at both melancholy and hope. He observes the often overlooked corners of life, the details many of us would pass by, such as an ink stain on a friend’s shirt or the fragments of a broken toy. And yet his paintings are not ordinary. There is a touch of magic realism about them, the sense that a veil has been lifted on the quotidian to reveal the emotional reality beneath. Flowers grow from a man’s chest, a boat with a strangely striped canopy drifts on the sea, a tree sprouts leaves of all shapes and sizes. The real and the imagined mingle almost seamlessly, until the viewer is left questioning what is possible.
