N. S. Harsha: “Come give us a speech (detail)”. 2008
N. S. Harsha: Charming Journey – Mori Art Museum The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, is proud to stage “N. S. Harsha: Charming Journey,” the first major solo exhibition by this Indian artist, from Saturday, February 4 to Sunday, June 11, 2017.]]>
Source: Mori Art Museum
N. S. Harsha was born in 1969 in the ancient capital of Mysore in southern India, and continues to be based there. While international interest in the Indian contemporary art world has burgeoned alongside the country’ s recent economic growth, N. S. Harsha has taken part in numerous international shows. Yet at the same time, he has persisted in engaging earnestly with the many aspects of “life” that surround him: the traditional culture and natural environment of southern India, the relationships between humans and the region’s flora and fauna, in the process carving out a unique position for himself. The artist deploys an array of expressive techniques, dominated by painting and including drawing, sculpture, installations and workshops. Underlying all his work however is a worldview in which the microcosmos, as symbolized by the human body; and macrocosmos, embracing all things, exist simultaneously, combined with a keen eye for life’s absurdities.
“N. S. Harsha: Charming Journey” will survey two decades of N. S. Harsha’ s practice, by presenting around 75 major works (including new works) produced by the artist from 1995 onward. The “journey” of the title hints not only at the life journey of the artist, but various other journeys too, including India’s economic development, the journey back and forth between the traditional and the contemporary, and an expansion from our everyday endeavors to a cosmic point of view. With an eye on Mysore as a star ting point, N. S. Harsha depicts situations and aspects of the world in a critical and humorous fashion, presenting its delights – ironies, love and paradoxes included – as a “charming journey.”
His is a viewpoint that, though locally rooted, encourages us to reconsider the ways in which modern and contemporary art have traditionally been interpreted through a Western canon. N. S. Harsha proposes an art that transcends time and space, freeing it to become something more universal.
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‘The Universe and Art’ at the Mori Art Museum (exhibition, 2016)
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