When we say Indian art and stainless steel in the same breath, we think Subodh Gupta. His giant sculptural installations with steel buckets, cooking pots and tiffin-boxes soldered together transform banal, everyday objects into amusing, eye-popping art, exploring themes of rural homeland, migration and otherness. But what if those sparkling steel surfaces reflected back contorted images of the current reality in all its sharpness and clarity? Hyderabad-based Anjaneyulu's Untitled at Art Alive Gallery's third edition of ‘Art NOW 18!’ forces us to peer inside the reflection one such spherical steel surface.
Occupying a corner wall at the expansive gallery among current, unseen works of masters and younger artists, 41-year-old Anjaneyulu's 84"x72" oil-on-canvas immediately invites extended study. From a distance, it looks like a globular funhouse mirror, distorting and playing with nearby paintings and mounted for visitors to goof around in. But on closer inspection, you see the specific details in crystal-clear definition and that it is in fact a painting by itself.
The steel ball has utensils stacked against wooden shelves; there is the Charminar framed against a crowded streetscape with autorickshaws, taxis and matchbox houses; a motorbike is parked in front, the concave mirror effect twisting it like a mangled heap; there is ample clear blue sky and is there a funny looking airplane too? The steel surface is dented on top like it bumped its head in transit. And sitting in the middle of it all, absolutely unperturbed and unmoved, are a herd of cows chewing cud in the sun-struck, chaotic bustle of the walled city of Hyderabad. More than cows being central to the Indian street experience, it is the current national discourse that Anjaneyulu wants to zero in on. "It is perhaps to the point that even in a spherical surface reflection, the cows manage to sit calmly. Never mind the twisted scrap, the distorted Charminar or the stack of curved utensils. It hints at their very centrality with respect to our national ethos or the lack of it," says Anjaneyulu about his newest work.
Born to weavers, Anjaneyulu G. was raised in a remote village called Garidepally in Telangana. He went to the village primary school and helped his brother paint signboards, being the youngest among five siblings. He came to Hyderabad to study at Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University and specialised in painting. After college, he started making still-life paintings of pots and pans, and cans and kettles—regular stuff he grew up around—touching in their simplicity and remarkable in the hyper-realism.
His 2015 exhibition, Astonishing Expendables, feature 14 still-life paintings of steel jugs and mugs in acrylic and oil, some eccentric and quirky against polka-dotted backdrops. At the India Art Fair in Delhi this year, he held his own with a solo with Art Alive gallery showing an astonishingly life-like range of paintings. The blue-chip exhibition where India's top art buyers descend saw high fidelity reproductions on canvas of items like cycle, soda cart, mancham with a chicken trotting on top, thumma kampa or thorns in Telugu, and a lantern.
All of these sundry, quotidian items seem to have come together to commune in this vignette of a day in old Hyderabad in all its disorderly glory. "I love the old city of Hyderabad. I go there all the time and click pictures," says Anjaneyulu who is currently exhibiting his cow-centred showpiece next to stalwarts like Krishen Khanna, Satish Gujral, Sakti Burman, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jogen Chowdhury, Manu Parekh and the venerable Thota Vaikuntam from Telangana. He's held five solo shows in Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai and is planning a show with Bernarducci gallery in New York. "There are no galleries in Hyderabad who can push your work on to the international plane. Artists have to work very hard in Hyderabad to get somewhere. My English is not that great too," he says self-effacingly, before going off to explore the older parts of Delhi on his short visit to the city.
Art NOW 18! which is showing Anjaneyulu's work, is on view till October 4 at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi.