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| EDUCATION : |
2001-2003 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Printmaking
2002 Study Abroad Program, Japan
Wintersession, The Rhode Island School of Design
2002 Palazzo Cenci, Rhode Island School of Design, Rome, Italy
Painting and Art History Study Program
1998-2001 College of Art, New Delhi, India, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting (transferred to Rhode Island School of Design)
1999 Pont Aven School of Art, Brittany, France
Summer course: Printmaking and Experimental Works on Paper |
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS : |
2009 The Geometry of Error, Gallery Espace, New Delhi
2007 Anecdote, Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise, New Delhi
2006 [Drawings and Prints] , Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
2003 Lucent, Benson Hall Gallery, Rhode Island, USA
2002 Vaaz, Benson Hall Gallery, Rhode Island, USA
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SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS : |
2009 Re-visioning Materiality II, Gallery Espace, New Delhi
2009 On Canvas, Gallery Art Motif, New Delhi
2008 PLACE, Anant Art Gallery, Delhi
2008 India Art Summit
2008, Pragati Maidan, Delhi
2008 Keep drawing! Gallery Espace, Delhi
2008 Ethos 4, Indigo Blue Art Gallery, Singapore
2008 Art Dubai, Gallery Espace, Dubai
2007 Asian Contemporary Art Fair, New York
2007 Art in step, Gallerie Ganesha
2007 Surface and Textures, Gallery Espace and Ganges Art, Kolkata
2007 High on Art, Visual Arts Gallery, Delhi
2007 Portfolio show at Southern Graphics Conference, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
2006 India on Canvas, Auction and Exhibition
2006 Multiplicity and the Self,, Visual Arts Gallery, Delhi
2006 Footprints – Women in printmakingGallery Chemould, Mumbai - Colab Art and Architecture, Bangalore, and WelcomArt Gallery, Vadodra
2006 17/03, at ABS Lanxess Gallery, Vadodara, Gujrat
2005 Blur, Montecastello Art Gallery, Montecastello, Italy
2005 Imaging Materiality, Visual Arts Gallery, Delhi
2004 Navsar, Open Palm Court Gallery, India Habitat Center, Delhi
2003 Arches Annual Print Exhibition, A Juried exhibition
808 Gallery, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
2002 Roma, Palazzo Cenci, Rome, Italy
2001 Print Matrix: Print Media Exhibition
Fine Arts Gallery, Fairfax, Virginia, U.S.A.
1999 Scapes, Gauguin Gallery, Pont Aven, Brittany, France |
WORKSHOP AND RESIDENCY : |
2007 Artist in Residence, Indo-French Residency Programme
2007 Painting and mixed media residency, School Visual Arts, New York
2006 Annual RPG art camp, Marve, Mumbai
2006 Learning Center, Art Instructor, Kusumpur-pahari, New Delhi
2005 Artist in Residence at International School of Painting,
Drawing and Sculpture, Montecastello, Umbria, Italy
2002 Assistant Instructor, Monotype Printmaking
Printmaking Department, The Rhode Island School of Design, U.S.A.
2006 Atelier 2221, Intaglio, Relief and Lithography Workshop
by - master printmaker, Devraj Dakoji, New Delhi
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AWARDS AND HONOURS : |
2003 Awarded Student of the Year, Printmaking
Rhode Island School of Design, USA
2002 G. W. Hodge Ritchie Award for Excellence in Printmaking, USA |
Anecdote- Curated by Roobina Karode : |
‘Mekhala Bahl indulges the seemingly arbitrary and revels in embedding inscrutable marks and forms within her painted gestures. Her works represent extracts from the everyday, which appear independent of overt imagery and similitude. It is in a mode of intensified expression that Mekhala captures precious moments of wonder and adventure. In fact, she repackages the tangible world with ideographs, signs and traces of observed reality. Unstructured and floating, her created world is open to instantaneous suggestion. Anonymous lines and shapes seem to record moments of discovery while traversing space, caught, as if in a dreamy moment.
For some years now, Mekhala has employed a hybridized approach to art making that attempts to juxtapose, even superimpose elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, writing and collage, to create a layered expression. She has enjoyed the optimal use of the artist’s toolbox - be it the palpability of oil, graffiti-like pencil work or the fluidity of water and ink. Her competence is apparent in both, the economy as well as the extravagance of means.
When desired or even necessary, she abandons the heavy impasto and encrusted surfaces to oscillate towards fine tinted drawings that trace the remnants of figures and places. But consistently, she enjoys the challenge of a chaotic surface in her work, arrived through a rough mixture of textures and effects, enhanced by the interplay between printmaking techniques that quiz the viewer and disallow immediate revelation of the process. The images invoked resonate as footprints of an urban buzz or the noise of chaos in the city- traffic lights, the clutter of under-construction flyovers, high-rise buildings and the green patches inserted within the residential areas. The world here is far from stasis, and the attempt to re-arrange or rather derange the observed fragments seems to play a significant role in the genesis of her compositions. Abstracting the ‘observed’ into anecdotal details, she sometimes leaves a bold patch playfully suspended or delicately anchors a frenzy of scribbles. Random entries and exits leave the composition vulnerable to spontaneous improvisations. The content of her work is inextricably bound to the processes of thought and action, a rather reflective, more than a communicative experience.
The shapes and dark lines are not so much about things, living or imaginary, as about lines of force, emotional knots, and psychic vistas. What one encounters is but a presence of nameless impulses, vigorous mark making and nervous reflexes which vibrate within a space of indeterminate reference. The chaotic squiggles, accidental blobs and drippings appear as mutations on the visible stimuli that represent an evasive or incommunicable essence. The two-dimensionality of a painting or a print is treated as a tactile ground where alternating acts of human touch - mark, scratch, rub, efface and smudge translate into elements that direct our gaze beyond physical boundaries to embrace spaces that hides in the folds of memory.
Saamnay, a monumental work is densely packed with signs and traces, as Mekhala suggests, “it contains eccentric representations of events that had taken place in my life until then”. This work, which involved nearly all the methods of printmaking- intaglio, lithography, block printing, chine colle, was her final project before returning to India. In comparison to this, some of her smaller works record time spans that are much shorter and anecdotes much more selective.
Mekhala has worked with a variety of unusual surfaces, moving from primarily figurative to surreal imagery and further to eliminating obvious imagery altogether. Her focus on marks and shapes to express her short stories is quite similar to the act of writing in a journal. Mekhala credits her accidental entry into Atelier 2221 and meeting master printmaker Devraj Dakoji, as instrumental in her dedication to printmaking. She recollects, “Dakoji taught me to work with the material and not simply use it.” This knowledge has further encouraged her to freely negotiate collaborations between diverse media in her paintings.
Stripes and patterns as seen in Framed and Trick Blanket, are fresh elements in Mekhala’s work. With the intent of imposing a regulating order via the grid of lines, in Pale Ale she creates a play between surface and structure, tracing shadows and vestigial references in muted tones of white. The spaces between the drawn lines leave hiding spots and optical depths, alluding to the visible and invisible. The stripes become a patterned backdrop for her tactful insertion of marks, traces and collaged fragments. These works announce a new pursuit that marks a distinct phase in her artistic practice, which indeed blurs the line between painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture.
Interchangeably trying out the appropriation of printmaking methodologies in painting and vice versa, Mekhala combines the indirectness of printmaking with the direct gestures and freer brushwork of painting. Printmaking seems to keep her out of comfort zone, allowing an element of discovery as far as the final outcome is concerned. For Mekhala, painting is more immediate, bolder in colours, offering a larger surface to work with, while easily allowing her to use varied media such as oil, acrylic, ink, pastel, charcoal for desired effect. At times, she seems to be writing in paint, an indecipherable script that becomes a vibrant texture animating an otherwise passive surface.
Wassily Kandinsky had said a long time ago - “Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential." Like many of her young contemporaries and practitioners of this genre of art, Mekhala is excited by the technical challenges and inexhaustible processes of form making, conjecturing its unknown possibilities, often pushing its set boundaries to engage with more precarious play and adventure within the visual language.
Instinct and order come together to create a striking informality - the nomadic force in the movement of paint or the citing of a dispersed line or smudge carries its own history and is its own subject.
Roobina Karode, Art Critic
April 2007
Works by Mekhala Bahl :
Latika Gupta, Art historian and curator
Mekhala Bahl trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, after which she returned to India in 2003 to pursue her individual art practice.
Mekhala has never restricted herself to single techniques or media. She has worked with materials as diverse as glass, wood, silk, paper, plastic and quilting. Her technical oeuvre extends from block -printing, etching and lithography, to drawing, painting or simply marks scratched on to the matrix. Mekhala creates endless possibilities; blurring and divesting watertight categories of their legitimacy in her art making. The scale of her work too, ranges from small intimate images to vast canvases, neither, adhering to practiced formulae.
Truthfulness to life is sometimes understood as a restricting imitation of surface appearances. Mekhala's work echoes life in all its layers- moving beyond optical illusionism to the perceived, subjective and felt. Unbounded worlds of possibilities are open to her as an artist and to the viewers of her work. An avid traveller, she has worked, and exhibited in countries and cultures as diverse as Italy, France and Japan. She recalls the solid and saturated colours of Rome in the summer and Japan, which, in her work translates into fragile lines, reflecting the careful decorum of a traditional society.
Her images read like journals- daily happenings, memories, recollections of dreams find place in her art. Intuition navigates the direction of Mekhala's hand as she scribbles, doodles and makes marks, creating layers both visual and emotive. A reading of Mekhala's work raises essential questions about the definitions that are accorded to categories such as 'Abstract', 'Representational' or 'Non-representational' art. As viewers, we need to discard the insistent need to read familiarity into an image. We have been taught to assign explanations to sounds, to visuals, turning each into a symbol with a fixed meaning, recognising only that which can be optically verified, forgetting perhaps to trust our mind's eye, our memory and instinct. Mekhala's works are representational- they map the places, people and experiences that the artist has encountered. She purges each of their recognizable forms, but each mark and even the titles of her works are rooted in actuality.
The beauty of Mekhala's work lies in the fact that there are no secure, static interpretations- marks transform before our eyes with every viewing; multiple meanings are created in every moment. For a viewer, what may initially appear as visual cacophony soon morphs into a remarkable symphony. Moving closer, we revel in the intricate details; the subtle wash of ink overlaying the matrix, the serrated edges that mark the borders of a metal plate, understated differences in the hues of a colour, or tiny pock marks created by a burin.
Mekhala's art moves beyond the skin of consciousness, beyond what is taught and into the realm of the felt, the experienced. It is this, which is then moulded into an artistic language that is not shackled within the world of optically recognisable imagery. Just as individual perceptions and subjectivities come together to weave life's rich tapestry, here, each colour, mark and line contains the potential to resonate differently for every onlooker.
Latika Gupta,
Art historian and curator, April 2007 |
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