INSIDE OUT EXPLORATION OF SHAMBHAVI'S REAPER’S MELODY

ND, Nov 30, 2014: In Reaper’s Melody, Shambhavi culminates her exploration of the life and work of the displaced farmer in an ever-shifting modern landscape.

From her personal experience of her homeland in rural India, the artist reflects on the farmer’s role as nurturer and provider on one hand, while negotiating the division and exploitation of land that threatens to dissolve its very existence.

Shambhavi with her work 'Megh Meyrd' - Acrylic on canvas board 2014

Talwar Gallery is pleased to present Reaper’s Melody, an exhibition of 
Shambhavi Singh’s new paintings, paper pulp works and sculptural installations.

The tactile, hand-worked quality and painterly surfaces of the works on view evoke such emblems of agricultural life as tilled and cultivated land, and deep, burrowing wells–the rudimentary markings of the farmer’s toiling, yet harmonious, elemental co-existence with the earth.

In a series of canvases in rich earth tones–Meyrd–the meandering paths cutting across freshly plowed earth are simple yet potent symbols of a farmer’s journey. The intense dark shades intermixed with patches of light in tumultuous brush strokes lure the movement and flow of the farmer’s work, and that of nature. Rustic implements, reminiscent of irrigation systems, and the Kuan series, illuminate the necessity of these simple components in yielding an essential element, while bringing to surface the darkness permeating the emptiness of these vessels.

Shambhavi brings into relief the widening chasm that disconnects one from the earth, and from their known roots. Evolving a unique vocabulary throughout her practice to encompass subtle form, intense color and the play of light within darkness, her works quietly articulate her concerns in narrative layers culled from abstraction and memory. Through enveloping darkness, she reveals the presence of something essential embedded in seeming absence: constellations scattered across the night sky, flickers of light on water–-the forms that emerge in shadow, forms lost to us in the glare of contemporary life.

Shambhavi Singh was born in 1966 in Bihar, India. In 1986, Singh received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting at the College of Fine Arts and Crafts, Patna, and in 1992, a Masters of Fine Arts and Painting from the College of Arts, New Delhi. Her works have been exhibited in India, New York, Australia, South Africa, Singapore and the Netherlands, and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY, among other institutions and private collections worldwide. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Talwar Gallery.

The artist currently lives and works in New Delhi, India.