HAUNCH OF VENISON LONDON 6 Burlington Gardens

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PRESS RELEASE In February 2009, Haunch of Venison London will present an exhibition of new work
by the Indian artist Jitish Kallat. Following his acclaimed exhibition at Haunch of
JITISH KALLAT Venison Zürich in 2008, Kallat’s new work showcases the full range of his visual
The Astronomy vocabulary incorporating video, sculptural installation, photography and the large
of the Subway format paintings for which he is best known. Tackling his foundational themes of
15 February – sustenance, survival and mortality in the contemporary urban environment of
27 March 2010 Mumbai, Kallat offsets a vivid, hand-made aesthetic with digitised renderings of
streets fit-to-burst, where the cumulative impression of daily existence is pushed to
Image:
the extreme.
Jitish Kallat
The Cry Of The Gland (detail) At the heart of the artist’s interest in the bustling metropolis lies the experience
2009
C-prints
of the individual within the crowd. This is driven by a play on scale, understood in
terms of a subject’s physical and metaphorical presence. Across two and three
dimensions, using a variety of media, and through assimilating the local with the
universal, Kallat checks the twenty-first century’s obsession with effects – images,
food, products, even people – by repositioning them in unfamiliar environments.
A large video projection shows x-rayed foodstuffs projected onto a dark celestial
space and pouring into view as asteroids, stellar formations, planetary clusters and
nebulae. In a sculptural installation, a miniature crowd of rioting figures scatters
across the floor, their scale exaggerated by the viewer’s height, as if seen through
the wrong end of a telescope.

Another piece in the exhibition is an intricately treated sculpture of an oversized

black lead kerosene stove that carries more than a hundred images on it. These are
culled from the porch of the Victoria Terminus building which is the nerve centre
of Mumbai’s commuter action. Curiously, the decorative architectural friezes carry
several images of animals devouring each other and clinging onto various foods.
Viewed together on a single sculpture, this sprawling mass is not unlike the daily
grind of survival that this porch bears witness to. In large paintings elsewhere,
the body is abstracted into ink blot formations, its stretched muscles and dripping
fluids becoming receptacles of urban trauma.

Undermining conventional notions of the local and universal, the micro and
the macro, and the way the two infect one another, Jitish Kallat’s forthcoming

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Continues ...

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VAT No. 799013791
Haunch of Venison Partners Ltd.
Registered Office: 8 King Street
St James’s, London SW1Y 6QT
HAUNCH OF VENISON LONDON 6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET
T + 44 (0) 20 7495 5050
F + 44 (0) 20 7495 4050
United Kingdom london@haunchofvenison.com
www.haunchofvenison.com

exhibition is a sustained meditation on the urban dwelling condition where

the struggle between self-improvement and social disorder is at its most stark.
The corpus of evidence Kallat presents is bound by Tristan Tzara’s Dada poem,
‘The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three’, which he re-presents here as a text
made from bone. Its combination of the close at hand, the nonsensical and the
cosmic – ‘let us always shuffle through the colour of the world/which looks bluer
than the subway and astronomy… our legs are stiff and knock together’ – distils the
world, half-here and half-there, mine yet theirs, which Kallat repeatedly evokes.

For information and images please contact Claire Walsh, Brunswick Arts :
T +44 (0)20 7936 1290
E haunchofvenison@brunswickgroup.com

EDITORS’ NOTES

Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat (born Mumbai, 1974) studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art
in Mumbai and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions
internationally. In addition to his inclusion in important museum exhibitions such
as Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2009), Chalo! Indua: A New
Era of Indian Art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2008), Thermocline of Art – New
Asian Waves at the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe (2007) and Century City at Tate
Modern in London (2001), Kallat has participated widely in biennials and triennials,
including The 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in China (2008), The 5th Asia Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia (2006) and The 6th Gwangju Biennale
in Korea (2006). Recent solo exhibitions have taken place with galleries in Beijing,
London and Mumbai. Kallat’s work is held in a number of important public and
private collections internationally including MOCA, Los Angeles, the Saatchi
Gallery and the Frank Cohen collection.

Haunch of Venison
Founded in 2002 by Harry Blain and Graham Southern, contemporary art
gallery Haunch of Venison works with some of the most important and exciting
artists working today, presenting a broad and critically acclaimed programme
of exhibitions at international gallery spaces in London, Berlin and New York.
In March 2009, Haunch of Venison moved their London programme to the
21,500ft² gallery spaces at 6 Burlington Gardens.

Registered in England No. 04421085

VAT No. 799013791
Haunch of Venison Partners Ltd.
Registered Office: 8 King Street
St James’s, London SW1Y 6QT