I Hope to Match Your Furniture

I Hope to Match Your Furniture

Gallery Latitude 28 presents a solo show of artist Sumit Roy's exhibition 'I HOPE TO MATCH YOUR FURNITURE' from January 13 - 18, 2018 at Visual Arts Gallery at India Habitat Centre. Sumit Roy’s works sit at the intersection of the intersection of traditional art practices and contemporary Indian visual language. He plays with the audience’s perception, presenting images that are in oils and acrylics created using alternative print techniques but which offer the illusion of being serigraphs. Thus, his oeuvre is at once as creative as it is distortive. Often his professional interest in communication design makes itself felt in his art; layered with typographical messages that add additional tiers of meaning, the works take on the nature of palimpsests, each one needing to be viewed at leisure, revealing new strata to be interpreted. An interplay of languages and contortions of icons that are part of the collective pop cultural consciousness leads the artist to present novel perspectives to the lay audience.In investigating the past to create the new, the visual culture he plays with, using tradition as his springboard, is in actuality an entirely fresh language of images. Traversing the realms of visual art, branding, communication design as well as music, his preoccupation with communication finds this multifaceted young prodigy drawing one of these worlds into the other, adding political commentary and offering to viewers a veritable feast for their intellectual and aesthetic faculties. 

“Sumit Roy– with his millennial outlook keeping in consonance with a strong theoretical grounding from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda – has an output that is grounded in tradition but entirely contemporary in nature. A politically astute and multitalented wunderkind, his passion for art, design and rap music inform his output. I HOPE TO MATCH YOUR FURNITURE is that rare show that will see him excavate not just his artistic talent, but also his fascination with music as he engineers a reapprochement between the past and the future.”  Bhavna Kakar: Founder/Director Latitude 28

“Our Democracy is broken and there is no single person who can fix it. Politicians are like actors on a broken stage that come, perform and walk away. They all stumble on the same broken planks, they all fall flat on their faces while the Audience laughs at them, makes memes about them and basically disses them every opportunity it gets.

An Arnab Goswami will swoop in and tell you that the planks were broken when Manmohan Singh was on stage. Some panelist will pipe in to tell you that Nehru and his dynasty is the one who broke the stage. Columns after columns will be written about the epic fall the latest actor had. But nobody is willing to get up and say, “Screw the actors. Let’s fix that damn stage.”

We want to ask you, The Audience, to go onto that stage and see those broken planks. We want you to scream and shout about the shitty state this stage is in, scream about how it’s ruining your show and not allowing your favourite actors to perform in the best possible way they can.” 

— Meghnad S, Vikram Bhattacharya, Shibesh Mehrotra (Consti-tuition)