Ruined Score (#3) Graphite, charcoal and ink on cotton paper 35×27cm (14×11")
Notes from a City Unknown represents a transformative period for the artist and her work. Over the last decade in New Delhi, Shah has steadily shifted her focus inward, revealing a near ascetic quietude and a clarity of purpose. Her work has refined a distillation of interiority and the materiality of particles in her immediate orbit. This exhibition brings together several distinct bodies of work united by their reflections on fragility and fragmentation in a variety of mediums: drawings, prints, and a large-scale sculptural installation. Cities speak to us in infinite ways. Notes from a City Unknown, a portfolio of thirty-two screen prints on paper, explores the city through sites of fissure, complexity and contradiction. Through poetic notations composed alongside architectural forms, the Notes draw on observations and reflections, both historic and personal, gathered over the last seven years.
Contested architectural sites and objects are explored through three bodies of work. Argument from Silence, a portfolio of ten polymer photogravure prints, refigure isolated fragments of Gandharan sculpture, speaking to the lives of objects in history and space. Extending Shah’s long-standing series of trace drawings, Single Utopias (Hall of Nations III-New Delhi) reflects on how material histories intersect with political tensions. Widely considered a modernist masterpiece, the Hall of Nations (demolished in 2017) is presented as a phantom through a large-scale graphite drawing on paper. In contrast to the ghostly lines of the Halls of Nations drawing, a cast concrete sculpture titled Object Repetition (line to distance) uses repetitive forms to create a dense abstract landscape. Ruined Score, a suite of unique graphite and charcoal drawings, extends the linear fragment into formal abstraction. Ruminating on the space between architectural abstraction and musical notation, these drawings explore the limits of language. Night, a series of drawings with multiple layers of heavy oil marks and scratched surfaces, and Formed by a Cut, a portfolio of woodcut prints, explore states of absence and weight through line and architectural elements. In this way, both Night and Formed by a Cut invert formal structures and compositional relationships, poetically challenging and balancing Shah’s work across drawing and printmaking.
Shah’s exhibition will be accompanied by a dedicated suite of drawings at the India Art Fair, New Delhi. Her work will also be exhibited at the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Manifesto of Fragility, in September 2022, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, In our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, thereafter in Winter 2022.
Seher Shah (b. 1975, Karachi) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Her works can be found in collections ranging from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queens Museum, New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai; Hallen für Neue Kunst, Schaffhausen; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Vienna amongst others.
Date 18-04-2022