VINOD DAVE

eMail: vinodave(@)gmail(dot)com

Telephone: 1 212 645 0767

Facsimile: 1 501 638 5801

(Artist's Bio at the bottom of site)

Ardhya 66X78 inch mixed-media on canvas 2008

Fashion Statement 72x94 inch mixed-media on canvas 2008

Camouflage and Not... 7 52X40 inch mixed-media on photocanvas 2009

Forgotten Epics 1 40X40 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2008

Camouflage and Not... 3 40X40 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Chhinna Masta 1 76X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 2008

Forgotten Epics 4 72X72 inch mixed-media on canvas 2009

Expectations 44X40 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Untitled 20X22 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

March 40X40 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Aftermath 40X40 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Untitled 24X24 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Divide & Rule 17X11 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Wasteland 42X46 inch mixed-media on papper 2009

When You Shanghai... 3 40X44 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

Masterbator 42X46 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Kiki's World 36X37 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

The Princess 20X28 inch mixed-media on paper 2008

Sins of a Sister-in-law 42X55 inch mixed-media on paper 2005

Castle of the Pious 40X48 inch mixed-media on photo paper 2009

More You 36X36 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Shiva and Nandi with Man and Cloud 2 40X54 inch mixed-media on canvas 2009

Royal Following 16 40X43 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Sacred Corner 6X6 inch mixed-media on paper 2008

The Feared Mediums 19X24 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

The Antithesises 19X24 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Mother's Tide 19X24 inch mixed-media on paper 2009

Lord of the Capitol 76X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 2007

Untitled 20X20X22 inch mixed-media on photographs and board 2008

Past Passages 3 8.5X11 inch mixed-media on paper 2005

Mahishsur Mardini 20X24 inch mixed-media on photograph 2003

Mahishasur Mardini 42X42 inch mixed-media on paper 2008

A Poet of Amalgamation

Mothr Victory 8.5X11 inch mixed-media on paper 2005

Asur Mardini 8.5X11 inch mixed-media on paper 2005

Vinod Dave is a poet of amalgamation. In his early works of photographic mixed media from the 1980s Dave began with images from mass and popular culture and blew them up beyond their pictorial values into over-modulated intensities, then painted onto them birds and people of immense delicacy, producing realms where public and private life furiously---yet poetically—intersected. The banal beauties of calendar art found themselves printed onto canvas then etched in a gouache resonant with mauve gardens and pale blue temple portals. Old photos from the British Raj were plastered with multi-colored Rajasthani peacocks and language from pre-independence newspapers. The effect was to bring the runes of the past into the explosive politics and kitsched quotidians of the present, generating a poetry of mysterious derangement. From sources in Rauschenberg, Pop Art and Surrealism, also in temple architecture and Rajput painting, Dave created an empire of imagery straining the bounds of human rationality, in which anxiety and pleasure, social reality and human privacy, disorder and rearrangement became inseparable twins, jolting the brain and soothing the imagination.

His art has come a long distance in these twenty five years, and yet the central contours of his world and work have remained of a piece with those earlier days. Dave’s images still explode with a history situated on the far shores of human rationality; his pictures still place power in collusion with patina. These layerings and juxtapositions have become all the more intricate, and frightening, since 911, which is the subject of Dave’s current exhibition. 911 is something he felt viscerally as a New Yorker, but also as an Indian citizen grown up on the vast legacies of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Ironically the vastness of the subject has spiraled Dave into things smaller: a series of mixed media works done in miniature size, the size of an ordinary color photograph on the family mantle, that of a Rajput painting. This shrinking of range is the occasion for an expansion of domain: into a world torn apart by fundamentalism, recalcitrance, hatred, violence. And yet the violence appears more quietly. Dave’s pictures are closer than ever to the Indian miniature framework in their use of ornamental border and washes of color. In them figures float in boundless space, or travel courtesy of that jet propelled god who never crashed into the World Trade Towers, the Vishnu-Garud. The quiet timelessness of the miniature subdues the iron-wrought intensities of the statement in these tiny but jam packed works, by bathing the violence in layers of poetic gouache. This build up of patina is overwritten in Arabic script, a writing as elegant as Urdu poetry. In Dave’s aesthetic procedure the present is placed in a larger, oceanic past, raising the question of its emergence. How did things take the current turn? What of the old cultures, were they the same? How can lovely men reciting poems to one another while drinking mint tea have arrived at this? What is the difference between a religious incarnation/avatar and a violently derailed airplane? What happens to cultures when they collide like vessels in the air? In these pictures everything is raised and nothing answered. As always, frames are contained within images, and those within other frames, suggesting displacement, appropriation, incandescence. In Dave’s work, big ideas come in little packages.

Daniel A. Herwitz (Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan)

Shabda Brahma

Shabda Brahma 60X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 2008

The Shabda Brahma canvas can serve as an introduction to Vinod Dave’s show. It is shaped like a new scripture equating all the major religions practiced in India and relating those to things fine and bold in the lay world, inclusive of animals real - “ real as well as drawn from the artist’s private mythology, while misty layers of gentle, radiant illumination impregnate the whole with warm lyricism.

Except for this declaration of faith, the paintings center round iconic figures of Hinduism, however filtered through Dave’s memory of his youth in Gujarat and his contemporaneity in New York. Perhaps, the very fact that he spends most of his time in the West but comes here every year, has clarified and enhanced the essential trait of this religion and its wider circumference - “ the multi-faceted and ever mutating connectedness between the hieratic, canonic tradition and somewhat rough but exuberant life on the mundane plane. Dave looks at the permeability of both with frankness overwhelmed by poetry, with a slightly ironic humor made tender and indulgent thanks to acceptance and loving. Whereas traces of classical imagery of the divine can be intuited, he relies primarily on its reverberations in popular culture. Aesthetic elements of the former can be noticed directly in the finesse of the contouring line and its volume-suggestive shading or in near-quotations from the miniature styles, as in the high horizon with curly cumuli or rain poring down in straight parallels and punctuated by tiny, sharp bird silhouettes.

Otherwise, the painter transforms traditional borders into a loose, a little gestural abstract design or an ornate floral frame from the bazaar. He stews the surface with delicately schematic emblems of the present reality and letters mingling with residues of the symbolic past.
His Saraswati comes from Kalighat, though most other gods seem to have stepped out of the calendars and cinematic mythological to undergo an intimate appropriation from Dave’s hands. This happens through the means developed from photography, picked up among urban neon lights as well as sketched softly from the artist’s own nostalgia. An iconographically correct Sheshshayi reclines on a sleek automobile, whereas a private goddess of forests is a foreign lady comfortable in a sari. A Krishna in trousers and an overcoat plays flute and the Ramayana heroes endearingly crude in their filmi Technicolor reflect the human ethos around the rustic background.

Thus, a tinge of the exotic is counterbalanced and complemented by the authenticity of the naive, the kitsch simultaneously expressing the spirit of the latter and being maneuvered towards greater complexities with a feel of both amused-involved immediacy and generalizing distance. The vibrant, teeming stir held in suspense settles, yet, to a partly regular structure, so hinting at an eternal pulse of things micro within the cosmic, although this can be realized only as an aura, one largely dependent on the interaction of minute details and the expansiveness of the paintings. The quiet, joyful sentiment prevails, even when confronted or invaded by signs of mortal danger, the cannons, sacred weapons and modern pistols pointing at the gods and surrounding them to warn of external as well as internal belligerence.

Marta Jakimowicz in Deccan Herald

Solo @ Bose Pacia Modern, New York

Hawks of a Dreamland 60X66 inch mixed-media on canvas 1998

The entanglement of the past in the present has long been a subtext of Vinod Dave’s mixed-media paintings. Since the early 1980s he has satirized the overt and the subtle violence of life in India and the global village in the canvases jammed with images form contemporary popular culture and the grand Indian visual traditions. Dave transcends the familiar postmodern despair of cultural mix and his newly spare works, exhibited at Bose Pacia Modern in New York in the late 1998, fold multiple conflicting references into a few carefully chosen and richly handled images. In his best works a brilliant interplay among these contradictions urges us to confront a paradox of mortal consequence: memory makes a lost dream of history, and that dream sustains us, even as it threatens to destroy us.

Dave’ recent paintings reverberate with a nostalgia for the traditions of village life. Initiating this project on a visit to his native Gujarat, he posed and photographed villagers costumed for the yearly Navratri performance of the Hindu classics. Blurred and painted over, these figures of Krishna, Radha, Ram and others are shrouded into a gorgeous haze. In The Divine Witness, 1998, a young boy seated in the forking branches of a tree and playing a flute emerges from a field of marine blue and red oxides mottled with brown, while in Hawks of a Dreamland, 1998, a couple dressed as Radha and Krishna gaze out from a sepia-toned desert landscape.

These are intimate mementos that link personal history with the historical past. Fading and frozen in time, Dave’s photographs evoke colonial images of the ‘natives’. He borrows the Bengal School’s melancholic nostalgia and the Company School’s treatment of the photograph as a flat surface to be painted over. These overlapping, divergent references remind us that Dave’s self-alienation is a cultural phenomenon, and that it began with colonization. But also, in synchronizing the past and present, he plumbs nostalgia’s deep, authentic roots. What reality has not yet redressed, the memorial imagination repairs with a unifying vision, a recollection entire at least in its beauty and intensity.

The most straightforward paintings of the show aim to awaken the viewer to the dangers of nostalgia, however compelling. With humor and superimposed drawings of threatening beasts and weapons, Dave disrupts the surface to warn that the image of past cultural wholeness is a myth; only violence has accompanied India’s attempt to make a reality of the dream. In A Pose Before the beginning of 14 Years, three villagers dressed as Ram, Lakshaman and Sita resemble politicians on a dais hailing an unseen crowd at a raucous rally. Slashes of black and red paint flaring from the base of the painting partially obscure the figures. Clearly, Dave’s reference is to Hindu extremists’ manipulation of religious devotion to incite a deadly parochialism.

In the most subtle and pertaining works, contradictions embedded in the photographs and superimposed drawings go further. They replace nostalgia with an acceptance of the difficult ambiguities of the past. The photograph in The Divine Witness and Hawks of a Dreamland, so effectively doubling as personal keepsakes and colonial-era ethnographic documents, reveal that Dave shares an exoticising vision with the imperial photographer. This transposition of the colonial and postcolonial subject acknowledges that colonialism is not only the source of the proud victim’s alienation, but also the antecedent of cultural consciousness. The longing that signals the artist’s absence from the landscape also discloses that the freedom has had the unexpected and painfully borne consequence of making a tourist of the native son.

In addition to issuing warnings, the sharply contoured drawings of these two works are transformative images. On the one hand, the leaping, snarling tigers surreally threatening birds, and the heraldic weapons, recall the heroic imagery and refined style of the courtly India miniature traditions. But they are reductive forms as well. They could be comic-strip characters or commercial logos. Surprisingly, they embrace the history of culture’s degradation into kitsch, and acknowledge the objectification of culture through mass production, tourism and symbol-seeking nationalism. If these elegant forms offer an image of the past, it is not the lost creature of cultural purity, but rather a motley, resilient and evanescent beast.

Dave does not dismiss nostalgia - the need for the cultural wholeness that fuels it is real - but because of the determinative force historical myths exert on the creations of the memorial imagination, he will not underestimate the danger. Perhaps most movingly of all, his paintings are remarkable for the faith they exhibit in art’s capacity to address these dangers. Believing that painting may still play a role in preserving and advancing a civil society, Dave urges us to perform one of the great feats of consciousness: to come to terms with history’s ambiguities and contradictions that we may repossess the past rather than be ruled by its false dreams.

Karin Miller-Lewis in Art Asia Pacific

Art Beyond Sight*

Untitled 8,5X11 inch mixed-media on papaer 2003

The Magician 76X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 1996
Elsa on My Mind 78X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 2002

The Divine Witness 67X60 inch mixed-media on canvas 1998

Mixed Messages 8.5X11 inch mixed-media on paper 2005

My work not only combines mediums; but also bridges global cultures, primarily of India and the West and interlinks the traditional and the contemporary. By interpreting popular images into personal statements, I have both paid homage to and also, like a typical Indian “quarreled with the Gods” by viewing them with contemporary sensibilitiy. I have always been fascinated by stories and images of legendary Hindu Gods and Goddesses and demons including their miracles, strange wars, incredible flights and multi-headed, multi-handed super physiques.

My personal interpretations of these are not a revolt for a change. It is simply my paintings that heighten the tension between the dualities of existence: those of the superior and the inferior. My work is about the tension that connects to a sense of violence that can not be categorized; but it exists. And it exists between the powerful and the weak, the controller and the controlled, the privileged and the deprived, the unique and the commonplace.

*OK, here is the reason Art Beyond Sight is my headline: I lost vision in my right eye in an accident in which, ironically, one of my own paintings hit my eye. As a result, I see with one eye only without perception of depth and spatial distance. This condition made me invent a different way of "seeing" that has lack of spatial depth. Therefore, my work uses graphic mark making (like letters, hard-edged lines and geometric shapes) juxtaposed with fluidly painted surfaces and forms to create "a feeling of spatial depth" with help of contrasting opposites as a substitute for the missing element.

A Random Access Gallery & Biographical Data

All works © Vinod Dave 2009

EDUCATION: 1956-2007.
Digital Film-Making, New York Film Academy, New York, 2007A+/Web Design, Micro Power Institute, New York, 2003.Cibachrome Printing, International Center of Photography, 1990.MA, Mixed-Media, Highest Honors, University of South Carolina, 1984.MFA, Painting, Highest Honors, M.S. University, India, 1976.BFA, Painting, Highest Honors, M.S. University, India, 1974.
EXHIBITIONS: 1978–2007.
Have held solo exhibitions at: Jehangir Art Gallery and Tao Gallery, Bombay (2005); Gallery ArtsIndia, New York (2004); Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore (2003); Apparao Galleries, Bombay, Madras and New Delhi (2000); Bose Pacia Modern, New York City (1998); Gallery 7, Bombay and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (1997); Gallerie 24, The Hague (1994); Center for Contemporary Art, New Delhi (1990); Gallery Chemould, Bombay (1986 and 1993); Girdharbhai Sangrahalaya Museum, Amreli, India (1987): Contemporary Art Gallery, Ahmedabad (1983); Max Mueller Bhavan, Bombay (1981); Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay (1980); Hutheesing Visual Art Center, Ahmedabad (1979) Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (1978 and 1982). Have had invited participation in: Niagara Falls Downtown Arts Development Artists' Residency, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 2008; Mueller-Plate Gallery 10th Anniversary Show, Germany, 2008; HOME AND THE WORLD, Rutgers University (2005); TIMELESS VISION at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (1999) and at Haggerty Museum, Milwaukee (2000); KALIGHAT PAITING at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (1999); EPIC REALITY at Houston Contemporary Art Museum (1997); THE OTHER WAY OF SEEING at Museum voor Volkenkunde, Rotterdam (1992); ); SOUTH OF THE WORLD at Galleria Civica D’Arte Contemporanea with Museo Civico, Milan (1991); CHINA-JUNE 4 at P.S. 1 Museum, New York (1990); ARTIST IN MARKETPLACE at the Bronx Museum (1988); FLAMES OF INDIAN ART at Worcester Art Museum (1986) and FESTIVAL OF INDIA exhibitions at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Bucknell University’s Center Art Gallery, Robert Hull Fleming Museum and Hood Museum (1985-1986).AWARDS/GRANTS/FELOOWSHIPS: 1974-2007
Had won the following fellowships, awards and grants in recognition of creative accomplishments: NYFA/FEGS Grants for Digital Film-making, 2007; New York State Consortium for Workers’ Education Grants for Computer Literacy (2003); Beaumont Foundation of America Technology Grant (award of a laptop computer) (2003); New York Foundation Arts Recovery Grant (2002); New York Association for New Americans Grant (2001); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1994); Artist’s Fellowship of the New York Foundation for the Arts (1990); Gottlieb Foundation Medical Grant (1990); Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (1983/84); MicKissick Museum Drawing Award (1983); Research Fellowship of Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (1980/81); Cultural Fellowship of Culture Ministry of India (1975/77); OASIS Painting Award (1976); National Scholarship, India (1974).
COLLECTIONS: 1975-2007
Artist's works are in the following collections: National Lalit Kala Akademi; Gujarat State Lalit Kala Akademi; Punjab University Museum; Lintas India; Tata Corporation; Max Mueller Bhavan; Swedish Embassy; Museum voor Volkenkunde, Rotterdam; Peabody Essex Museum; Lufthansa German Airlines; Asian American Arts Center; Asian Cultural Council; Darpana Dance Academy, India; Haryana State Tourism Corporation; Chester and Davida Herwitz Trust; The Alkazi Collection and private collections.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1975-2007
Had works published in the following books: HOME AND THE WORLD, Cambridge Scholars’ Press (2007); CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART – Other Realities, Marg Publication, (2002); COMERADES AT ODDS, Cornell University Press (2000); CONTEMPORARY ART IN BARODA, Mapin Publication (1997); MYTEC DIRECTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS, Mytec Press (1991); CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART, NYU Press (1985/86); FESTIVAL OF INDIA, Harry N. Abrams (1985) and in art journals (Marg, ART Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Flash Art, Art in America, ART India, FOTOart etc.), museums/auctions/galleries catalogues, Google keyword: Vinod Dave
TEACHING: 1977-1993
Had been on experts’ panels at: Asia Society, 1984 and Asian American Arts Center, 1998.Given visiting lectures at: National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1979;and School of Visual Arts, New York, 1993.Directed summer camps at the Yoga Retreat in Stroudsburg, 1986/91.Professor of Art at C. N. College of Fine Arts, India, 1977/82.Directed art workshops of Gujarat State Lalit Kala Akademi, I 1978/81.
AUCTIONS: 1995–2005My works have been auctioned annually by: Sotheby’s and Christie’s, CRY Foundation, South Asia Against AIDS Foundation and Pakistani Literacy Fund.RESEARCH: 1975-1976 and 1983-1984Wrote two masters’ theses: 1) Visions of the Essence (1984) and 2) Surrealistic and Expressionistic Tendencies in Contemporary Indian Art (1976).