Jitish Kallat - New Now London Thursday, July 13, 2023 | Phillips

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  • A portrait of a city and its doppelganger; a vast terrain of forged people, their heads flourishing – quite literally – with the bustle of daily life. Haircuts composed of bicycles and livestock, dump-trucks and schoolhouses, pedestrians and merchants, sprout-like cornucopias of ambition and imagination bound together, sustaining the skyline of a great metropolis. It’s a celebration of community, recalling hippy murals and album covers, tripping on the vibe of grass roots righteousness and psychedelic utopia. Kallat constructs this vision with a home boy’s pride, the minutiae of detail sharing his own clannish camaraderie. Each and every figure a real person, faithfully rendered from photos taken outside a train station, their transient existence validated and monumentalised – the nameless heroes of a cyclical (re)evolution. Kallat’s social realism encapsulates the very spirit of locality, its history and aspirations with unnerving accuracy; for this is a painting of a city out of place.

    The thing with folklore is it exists out of synch; not in time, but many. It offers a sense of magic, a generational collapse, where copy after copy, retold and diluted, distils from ‘once upon a time’ an enduring and resolute truth. There’s no coincidence that Kallat approaches painting as erasure. His colours bleed and dapple, assert ghostly form, play tricks of light. Concocted from watery elixirs, applied and scrapped off, misted with corrosive liquids, each layer melting seamlessly into the next in biological and alchemical continuity. Their physicality isn’t in their substance, but rather the complete lack of it – a conception of place as indelible stain, palimpsests of uncountable intimate gestures. His canvases are less surfaces than screens: image receptors and transmitters, broadcasting fact and fiction in indistinguishable correlation.

    • Provenance

      Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai
      Tiroche DeLeon Collection
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

141

Untitled (Stations of a Pause)

signed and dated '- 2010 JITISH KALLAT -' centre left; signed, titled and dated '- 2010 JITISH KALLAT - UNTITLED (STATIONS OF A PAUSE) -' lower right;
signed, titled and dated '- 2010 JITISH KALLAT UNTITLED (STATIONS OF A PAUSE)' on the overlap; signed, titled and dated '2010 JITISH KALLAT UNTITLED (STATIONS OF A PAUSE)' on the reverse

acrylic and graphite on canvas with two bronze sculptures
canvas 174.9 x 274 cm (68 7/8 x 107 7/8 in.)
each bronze sculpture 39 x 30 x 28.5 cm (15 3/8 x 11 3/4 x 11 1/4 in.)
overall approx. 210 x 274 x 28.5 cm (82 5/8 x 107 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

Executed in 2010.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for £57,150

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now
+44 20 7901 7993
CGibbs@phillips.com

New Now

London Auction 13 July 2023