N S Harsha

Born 1969 in Mysore, India Lives and works in Mysore, India N S Harsha’s wide-ranging work includes detailed figurative painting and drawing, semi-abstract panels, sculptures and installations, site-specific projects and community-based collaborations. Harsha is celebrated for his reworking of the tradition of Indian miniature painting, assimilating Mughal, Pahari and Rajasthani schools and translating them to the monumental style of traditional wall paintings. Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bupen Khakkar on whose foundations he builds, Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. As the miniature painting format has regularly been used to highlight social and political inequities, Harsha’s reference to them represents an embrace of the tradition updated by his personal idiom to embody contemporary conditions. His large-scale and intricately detailed canvases depict a microcosm of Indian life. The multitude of figures are all animated in unison and focused on an incongruous or comically strange event. Or they are animated by some mutual curiosity. Harsha’s paintings wittily combine rites and rituals common to Indian life with images drawn from world news. This tendency is most poignantly evident in Smoke Goes Up Smoke Goes Down Your Search For Me Is Always On, part of a cycle of twelve paintings made between 2004 and 2006. Ultimately Harsha’s works are a sensitive and empathetic depiction of the human condition alluding to the convergence of local and global concerns, refracted through the prism of his life in Mysore city. Mass Marriage, is an extension of his concerns about diversity revealed through repetition and multiplicity, strategies which pervade his paintings as well as his installation works. Other paintings are vignettes featuring characters set against a dark background. Some are straightforward critiques of the art-world while others highlight the increasing tension between poor rural and rich urban communities as city developers encroach on farming land. Agricultural labourers are depicted as subservient to educated city figures with suits and briefcases. This imbalance is emphasised further by the provocative texts incorporated into his paintings such as They Will Manage My Hunger, 2005. Harsha’s large-scale installation Cosmic Orphans, 2006, was a site-specific painting installed at the Sri Krishnan Temple, created for the Singapore Biennale. Harsha covered the entire surface of the ceiling above the inner sanctum and directly on the floor surrounding the temple’s tower with paintings of sleeping figures reminiscent of the multitudes that sleep helpless on platforms at Indian railway stations in the eternal wait for trains that never arrive. Harsha deliberately chose temple spaces not normally associated with traditional painting. Indian cultural inheritance having strong taboos against stepping on another human being provokes the audience to consider the boundaries of the sacred and profane so strictly adhered to by the priests. Consequently the pathway to the inner sanctum and onwards towards transcendence becomes an insurmountable boundary. For the Serpentine, this idea of an insurmountable boundary is evident in the site specific wall painting Harsha has produced. He depicts a crowd restrained by a makeshift fence Harsha painted directly on the gallery wall, here it is the audience being confronted and asked to think about their relationship to the crowd.   Savita Apte, Rebecca Morrild

N S Harsha Come give us a speech, 2008