NS Harsha

Drawing on a broad spectrum of Indian painting traditions and popular arts, as well as the western canon, NS Harsha creates quietly philosophical, luminous works that reflect on geopolitical order and our ever-more technologically mediated relationship with the world. In exquisitely rendered paintings, works on paper, wall and floor works, sculptures, site-specific installations and public projects, the Mysore-based artist examines structures, borders and barriers as a series of ever-shifting concepts, alluding to an interconnectedness that compels the viewer to consider their relationship to the art work as part of a wider conversation about systems of knowledge, belief and power. While storytelling endures at the heart of his practice, linear narrative remains largely absent from the loosely gridded compositions of Harsha's canvases. The artist has described the process of producing these works as something like a chanting with forms, recalling a musical sense of cyclical time. The mood of these densely populated works is quietly philosophical. They lend a gentle humour and dreamlike grace to the human struggle of making meaning (whether scientific or spiritual). It is this non-hierarchical weaving of elements that lends Harsha's work a visual richness and generosity of spirit.