NS Harsha: Camel and the tent times
Victoria Miro is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by NS Harsha.
Camel and the tent times elaborates on the artist’s celebrated, ongoing ‘lamp grid’ series. The paintings all feature diyas – lamps traditionally made from clay that are lit during rituals, prayers, ceremonies, celebrations and during power cuts – with flames and trails of smoke together creating patterns that guide the eye around each canvas: rising as a column (Workers having a break); ascending the legs of a table (Camel and the tent times); dancing shoal-like (Journey through water marks); or delineating a series of fluid brush strokes (Harvest as a water mark).
The emerging narratives pivot between aspects of work and rest, the small yet heroic figure of the worker appearing in agricultural or industrial scenarios that springboard into larger philosophical questions. Workers having a break takes inspiration from the well-known 1932 photograph Lunch atop a Skyscraper, depicting ironworkers sitting on a beam of the RCA Building during the construction of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Harsha’s diverse workforce takes its break held aloft by trails from a central column of lamps that extend into a nocturnal sky, suggesting a more mysterious interlude or escape into the nightly realm of dreams. The composition is echoed in the fiery A chandelier of our time, which the artist describes as ‘a chandelier studded with eternal human labour’.
Workers in ostensibly rural settings, such as in Harvest as a water mark, inspired by a visit to a paddy field, find themselves in the company of suited middlemen counting money, or birds feeding on insects and cows grazing, indicative of other ecosystems. This theme is picked up in Again, and again, and again where stooped rice field workers and ascending flames are counterpoints in a composition of rhythmic insistence.
Often the paintings explore the interplay between a static, harmonising structure – in essence, a grid or succession of diyas, figures and other motifs, depicted in a shallow space on backgrounds of a single, strong colour – and fleeting natural forces. Harsha describes his intent to capture a momentary event passing through a collective framework, much like a gentle breeze causing flames to twist, turn and flicker in their struggle to remain alight. He finds beauty in the dynamic tension between stability and flux, especially when viewed as part of a wider consideration of the structures of knowledge, belief and power, and the potential of an invisible force to reshape and drive change.
Image: NS Harsha, A chandelier of our time (detail), 2023
Acrylic on canvas
137 x 107 cm
54 x 42 1/8 in
© NS Harsha
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
