Ajay Dhandre (Artist Profile)
Viral Cosmology (Artist Zine)
Digital offset print on 160 gsm Rendezvous paper
6 ×8” / 16 x 20 cms (featuring images of 10 works)
2020
Edition of 100 (signed and numbered by the artist)
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Ajay Dhandre’s work represents a lasting predilection towards futuristic, technological and science fiction inspired imagery. He playfully merges forms: organic and inorganic; natural and man-made; real and imagined; flora, fauna and human forms: to create works that never fail to inspire curiosity, albeit verging on the aspect of the morbid, mutilated and grotesque.
To quote art critic Ranjit Hoskote, “Dhandre’s interest in chimeras, hybrids, and devices is significant, it articulates his understanding of the future as an outcome of crossovers, genetic experiments, laboratory side-effects and the confluence of diverse impulses […] The acceptance of hybridity brings with it, of course, the awareness that the celebration of diversity is edged with the menace of the unknown, the peril of the unforeseen, the difficulties of negotiating predicaments without precedent.” (2007, catalogue essay)
The current work functions almost like a cosmology of the current viral landscape, imagining its life and universe; and it’s larger inter-relationship with existence. While we have consciously avoided references to the virus or the pandemic in general in this project; and focussed largely on the emotive landscape of the lockdown experience instead; Dhandre’s work departs from this as he images the submicroscopic agent and posits it as part of a larger landscape of existence, in his inimitable artistic style. We are reminded that the smallest units of existence actually can be at the root of significant upheavals and are reminded yet again of the unfathomable and yet ever-engaging mysteries of the universe...
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