Bari Kumar
Foreign Bodies
December 20 - January 17, 2008
Kolkata
BOSE PACIA KOLKATA
Bari Kumar: "Foreign Bodies"
Opening on Saturday, December 20th from 6 to 8pm.
The exhibition continues through January 17th, 2009.
Bose Pacia Kolkata is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Bari Kumar. The artist has become well-known for his distinctive works which fuse techniques associated with Old Master paintings and content that reflects the contemporary situation of cultural hybridization. Kumar sources imagery from the various cultures of both South Asia and the Americas, highlighting that which is by nature confused and bastardized, without anchors in specific places or historical eras. He combines these images with cryptic phrases in a number of languages, to create puzzle-like pictures that are both nebulous and over-loaded with meanings, often addressing religious and social conflicts. In the end, the works are deeply personal, elaborating on the artist's life lived between two different worlds, both of which are internally complex.
Bari Kumar was born in 1966 in Vakadu (A.P.), India. He received a BFA degree from the Otis/Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles in 1988. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2007 and 2004), Grosvenor Vadehra, London (2008), the Jehangir Nicolson Gallery, Mumbai (2006) and Billy Shire Fine Arts, Los Angeles (2005). Important group exhibitions that have featured his work include the Sydney Biennale 2008, "Fatal Love" at the Queens Museum in New York City (2005), "Unfamiliar Territory" at the San Jose Museum in California (2003), and "Shifting Perceptions" at the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, California (2001), among many others. The artist divides his time between Los Angeles and India.
For more information and press photographs, please contact the gallery director, Bhavana Agnihotri, at (33) 4001-0021 or 6545-9955. She can be contacted on email at: bosepaciakolkata@gmail.com.