THUKRAL & TAGRA | METROPOLIS -1

Acquired from Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi in 2007

Private collection, France

Sotheby's New York, 18 September 2008, lot 122

Based in New Delhi, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, graphic and product design, Web sites, music and fashion. Their works are inspired by fashion and advertising as much by art history, they combine cutting-edge computer graphics with retro-styled accessories, they are among the new generation of young Indian artists who defy easy classifications.'Thukral and Tagra may most resemble the Japanese wunderkind Takashi Murakami, he of the cartoon figures that cavort from paintings to designer handbags to mass produced souvenirs to precious Jewelry. What all these artists share is a celebratory attitude towards their cultural products, foregrounding that act of making over the act of editing, preferring production over theorization.' (Exhibition catalogue, Thukral & Tagra, Nature Morte and Bose Pacia gallery, 2007, p. 7)

Utilizing their fake brand "Bosedk" (a tongue-in-cheek Anglicization of an abusive term used in Punjabi), Thukral & Tagra blur the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, artistic inspiration and media hype. 'Bosedk Design permits Thukral and Tagra a platform from which to infiltrate an available media, to saturate all possible avenues with their aesthetic.' The current work brings together a number of these themes to present massive billboard styled image that comments on consumerism, the commoditization of art and the recycling of styles. Over a series of recent exhibition products labeled as "Bosedk" appear in a wide variety of forms, all attractively packaged but intentionally empty, selling nothing more than their own brand name. The language of advertising is applied to the paintings, while the gallery is presented as a supermarket. The effect is to make one conscious of the collusion between the art market, the retail industry, globalization and fashion branding. 'Thinking in images, Thukral and Tagra squire an almost infinite number of pictures into these product labels, submerging daily life into the surface of these commodities, requiring the viewer to both hunt and peck for the shredded remains of actual experience. Pop art for sure, but unlike Warhol, whose creations parasitically lived off the glamour or notoriety of his chosen subjects, Thukral and Tagra's Pop is trapped in its own narcissistic spiral, committing incest so as to devour their offspring alive.' (ibid., p. 12)