S.Kalidas' Archive

Dhruva Mistry: Forged Dualities

By S. Kalidas

On till February 23: By displaying the sculptures of one of India’s most celebrated sculptors, Dhruva Mistry, at the colonial palace of the erstwhile Maharaja of Travancore in the very heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, Bodhi Art has scored another high: A stunning show in a splendorous setting. With its Palladian façade and large halls with high ceilings, this gem of a building which now belongs to the Kerala government is superbly suited to house art, and viewing Mistry’s modernist steel works in it is sheer delight.

Born in a Gujarati carpenter’s family and trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda and Royal College of Art, London, Mistry revels in forging seemingly disparate elements into objects of dialectical fluidity. Here he presents his recurring muse, the human body, in multi-lateral and multi-layered dimensions. The hard, tensile strength of steel sheets is cut and welded to reveal the sensuous figures that his imagination—informed as much by the Greco-Roman tradition as by native Indian practice— conjures up with an impish sense of play or leela.

Last year, Pablo Picasso paid Mistry a mind-visit. The encounter resulted in Mistry evoking the Guernica in a seminal work titled Expulsion of Pain that fused the Spaniard’s masterpiece with Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano and the image of Kali slaying the demons as seen in a Pahari miniature.

In the present exhibition, Mistry’s figures and torsos are neo-cubist constructs with a third mystical dimension. In effecting this spatial and temporal transformation, it seems Mistry has brought the power of  Shiva’s third (all revealing and all destroying) eye to work. These figures are  not static pieces; they appear to be contorting, moving or at rest as if in an asana. The show also has a series of charming wall hangings that he calls maya-medallions and some Miro-esque steel collages.