PRESS RELEASE
Aicon Gallery Exhibition January 20th – February 18th, 2017
Press Preview & V.I.P. Reception: Friday, January 20th 6:00pm – 8:00pm
35 Great Jones St., New York NY 10012
Aicon Gallery is proud to present From Today, I Have No Future, the first major New York solo exhibition by New Delhi-based artist M. Pravat. The exhibition hinges on a large body of complex mixed media works continuing Pravat’s visual explorations into our external and internal perceptions of space and time, and the effects of both on our memories and the physical objects and experiences that create them. We are also privileged to be hosting the artist in attendance the evening of the reception.
Pravat’s works predominantly begin with the examination of architectural forms or plans - some iconic, and some imagined – which are then deconstructed and built up again, in a visual manifestation of the process undergone by our personal memories of environments and events as they shift, blur and break down over time. Similarly, as this process progresses in our thoughts and memories, the physical structures and spaces from which they are born are themselves undergoing an inevitable process of decay, disruption and often ultimately destruction, particularly in the rapid changes accompanying today’s unprecedented expansion, and sprawl of both urban and informational landscapes. Pravat’s work aspires to capture this precarious process of preservation and disintegration, of building up and tearing down, of physical and mental clutter and chaos, as we experience it both internally and in the world surrounding us.
As the artist himself states:
Our lives are unquestionably shaped by the built environments that we inhabit. And as much as we occupy architectural spaces, architecture itself occupies a unique place in our sensibilities. As a painter my practice is deeply embedded in manifestations as well as imaginations of architectural spaces. The intersection of images and built environments offers increasingly newer possibilities to imagine space in the contemporary moment, especially when different utopia’s are on a collision course with one another. With the world today swarmed by an excess of images and virtual spaces, what constitutes the notion of the real and the concrete is in drastic flux. Through my practice as a painter, I explore what this phenomena of excess does to our imagination of concrete spaces as I try to shed the representational familiarity associated with our built environment. In doing so, I find myself appropriating, redistributing and reconfiguring the relationship between images and materials that are central to our idea of space and forms.
M. Pravat completed his Bachelor’s degree in painting in 2002 and his Master’s in 2004, both from the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, Baroda. M. Pravat has had two previous solo exhibitions with Delhi’s Anant Art Gallery, an exhibition with Seoul’s Gallery LVS, and two solo exhibitions at Delhi’s Nature Morte. He has participated in a wide number of group shows in New York, Paris, New Delhi, Mumbai, Baroda and London, and was the recipient of a Pro Helvetia artist residency in Switzerland in 2010. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.