Anniversary
The title of the exhibition featuring Tara Sabharwal’s works spanning a decade, is taken from William Blake’s famous poem, The Tyger. Although the focus of the poem surrounds the elusive and mysterious characteristics of the tiger it also questions its ferocious quality. Does creation need to be wild and untamed or is it expressed only through and as the sublime? What is the purpose of creation and how do these extremes play out within the psyche of an artist.
In the Forests of the Night, takes off from this very enquiry of observing the process of creativity and abstraction that emerges from the subliminal. Psychologists employ the term to mean below the threshold of consciousness. A plane of being that absorbs all experiences, just as the way night absorbs all light or black absorbs all colour. A perceptive space that dissolves light and shadow into a mythic experience of the subliminal, that Leonard Mlodinow an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, terms as the new unconsciousness.
Fertile Evening
Tara Sabharwal’s abstraction is a walk into the forests of the night, where the cognitive faculties are refined to suit more than one purpose. In manner where the auditory, olfactory and tactile faculties chart the map of envisioning the way into the forest, that metaphorically represents the subliminal. Each of the series presented in the exhibition are mnemonic patterns bridging the worlds of the new unconsciousness to the conscious. Unlike abstraction that derives from minimalizing nature/landscape, or an abstraction that is composed through the notations of sound and music, or an abstraction that reflects the memory of a place; Tara’s abstraction blurs all conscious attempts of reality and presents the invisible roots that governs conscious-visible existence.
Pink City Walk
Every seed has the potential of growing into a tree, and how is one to express that potential within the seed, without seeing the tree? As a practitioner of Buddhist meditative discipline and a transcriber of her own dreams, Tara navigates through layers of consciousness expressing its extremes, and at times plunging into the subliminal void from which emerges all possibilities. The exhibition thus traces the antithesis, as well as the probabilities of chance, expressed through textural patterns, splurges of colour and an architectonic of shapes. An undefined composition and uncertainty upholds these abstractions. Unwilling to be defined through any specific language or aesthetics, she carefully orchestrates a chance aesthetics from the subliminal.
Now 1
Tara Sabharwal
Born in Delhi in 1957, Tara Sabharwal is a contemporary Indian artist who studied painting at the MS University, Baroda, and received her Masters from the Royal College of Art in London. Her subtly layered compositions employ dreams and memories to create powerful abstract forms informed by surreal imagery combined with a variety of art materials ranging from watercolors, pastels, ink, collage and found objects.
Flooding Boundary
In the Forests of the Night will be on view till 15th December, 2023 at Bikaner House.
Words Platform Desk
Date 14.12.2023