Jitish Kallat (b. 1974)

Oil and mixed media on canvas. The correct title for this work should read The Dog and The Moon. Stretched warped otherwise painting in good condition. Colors slightly brighter than catalogue illustration.
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The work of the Bombay-based artist Jitish Kallat has affinities with many elements of contemporary Indian urban culture, from film and political posters to the slick billboards of international advertising. The artist resurrects the decayed images of mass media, piecing together old photographs, faxes and photocopies to create a visual collage from which he paints his canvases. Adding his own text and copyright symbols like truncated slogans or brand names across his paintings, Kallat exposes the idiosyncrasies of mechanical reproduction by revealing the grainy resolutions and cropped compositions of his news clippings and internet printouts. Kallat's large-scale canvases tend to be semi autobiographical but hint at more universal themes. Jitish says of his works, "Although the works are in the manner of a personal diary they are often modelled after and made to simulate the weather beaten walls of a city. The wall is a carrier of graffiti and posters: a public pin-board on which the community displays its emotions and protests. It is like these shared muniments that I choose to make my inscriptions: by giving a public dimension to private records." The works appear to be pictorial quests that seek to answer the riddles of contemporary urban India. Jitish states, "my art is more like a researcher's project who uses quotes rather than an essay, with each painting necessitating a bibliography."

'The Dog and the Moon' was exhibited in 1998 as part of Jitish Kallat's second solo show titled 'Apostrophe'.  Most of the paintings in the show comprised of self-portraits. "I choose to make autobiographical references while I paint and these are often entwined with strands of fiction. The central self- image, either posing as a seated thinker or an inquisitive wanderer, becomes the protagonist around which the narrative is laid out like a webwork.  The exhibition itself is conceived as a complex unit where fragments of the imaged discourse and textual utterances behave like plugpoints for the circuitry of ideas to connect and freeflow." (Jitish Kallat, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue 'Apostrophe' 1998).

The artist states 'compared to the rest of the works in the show, 'The Dog and the Moon' seemed to stand in a separate register.  It is built on several layers of visual deception and trompe l'oeil. At one level, what appears like a crescent moon is in fact mischievously changed for a banana over which a line drawing of a bone is super-imposed.  The bone is made up of several intricate drawings derived from the caves of Ajanta and Ellora. In the lower right of the canvas one sees a small caricaturesque drawing of a dog. The only link this dog has with the rest of the self-portraits in the show was that the dog has a pair of spectacles playfully placed in its pocket. Is it the young artist (self) masquerading as a dog seeking to crack the codes of the fantastic art of the past?'  (Personal correspondence with the artist).

"While the gist of my purpose is an investigation into my self, my urban upbringing and my ancestry (familial/artistic/ethnic), it is crucial for me to deflate the heroic image of the seeker and pound the pietism with the graphic punch of billboard and the glibness of graffiti. I strategically convert my quest into a game: the viewer could identify the passwords, ingest the data and disentangle the pictures in the middle of a riddle." (Jitish Kallat, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue 'Apostrophe' 1998).