The walls of the gallery are stripped bare and the floor is filled with huge works of bronze, iron, stone and other material for artist Y. Shivarama Chary’s show Melting the Cosmos.
The show, which starts Saturday, will feature the artist’s best works in the last decade and will also have a tiny museum showcasing art from ancient to contemporary times. Also part of this museum will be an interactive video presentation of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud.
“If I thought about marketability, I wouldn’t be able to bring this kind of works to you,” says the artist.
Chary has just recovered from an eight-month sickness. He says he had almost given up hope that he would be able to bring to fruition the ideas that had come to him while in bed. “But I finished a year’s work in six months,” he says.
A 10-feet “kinetic” sculpture that rotates once a minute draws the viewer through motion sensors. Chary will also display what he calls “Art Rack” comprising one piece each from 10 years of his work. “I started my career in art in 2003 and this marks the completion of a decade. So I wanted to bring all of them together in a retrospective installation that I call ‘Art Rack’. The idea is to bring together all the mediums that I have worked with in one installation. So far, I have worked with clay, terracotta, iron, bronze, stone and fibreglass. Working with scrap material started only last year. Each medium is different and even the portrayal of the idea is unique,” he says.
Besides working on several media to explore newer expressions, the artist has also experimented with the spaces he worked in. “Consciously or subconsciously, the spaces we work in really affect us. When I was working in my workshop, I wondered how it would be to work without the tools and the readily available materials. So I started working in my mobile studio. I would travel to different places and breathe in the energy there and collect the materials around and work in a temporary camp,” adds Chary.
The artist will also be doing a “live” sculpting project at the gallery throughout the show.
Chary was first exposed to sculpting by his father. He comes from a family of temple sculptors. “He was my first guru. I learned sculpting from him. In fact, I still use the same technique when I work with bronze,” he says, adding that bronze will always hold a special place in his heart. “Each medium responds differently to treatment and ideas. Bronze and iron are the toughest to work with. But the satisfaction you get from working on a bronze sculpture is the ultimate,” he says.
“There is no such thing as finishing a work. There have been times when I have packed a work for display but have immediately unwrapped it to work more on it,” he says.
