Lightning Girl: Anu Agarwal

Curator and performance artist, Himanshu Verma profiles the young artist Anu Agarwal and says in his characteristic style that she is a bold, sexy and cool new artist on the block!

I first met Anu Agarwal with Julius Macwan, and in the presence of her mentor she came across as a subdued persona. Even in subsequent meetings I felt that she was a shy girl, almost to a point of being unfriendly at times, but I had no idea what was in store for me when I discovered her actual self. Soon, we became good friends and I would often talk Anu into flying down to Delhi whenever an exhibition curated by me, featuring her as one of the artists, was opening. Tactfully, but without much effort, I would then talk her into putting up the whole show for me after having visualised it together; while I primped and pampered myself at the parlour getting ready for the big evening, or ran around Delhi with our mutual friend Amita Abbi in last minute attempts to get my costume for the evening together, entailing things such as getting saree blouses made overnight!

Frivolities apart, I am here to introduce you to this charismatic, endearing personality, with endless funk, energy and resourceful enthusiasm. If there is a list of young people (she’s all of 29) who are super-figured out and have a beautiful head on their shoulders, then Anu is definitely one of the few people on that list. The Week featured her as one of the 20 people who would leave a mark in 2006. The marks she made in 2006 are only going to proliferate in 2007 and in the years to come. Agarwal starts the year with a bang: an online show of her recent works with The Arts Trust , currently showing on their website.

Hailing from Chennai, from a non-artistic background, Anu studied commerce in college. Her aptitude for art however was there to be seen from the very beginning. After she graduated in 1997, Anu joined a diploma course in painting at the Julius Macwan Institute, under the tutelage of Julius Macwan. Starting from scratch, she received sound academic and creative training here and in a couple of years she knew that this was the beginning of a lifelong passion. She graduated from the institute in 2000. Thereafter, up till 2002 she was on the faculty of the institute as one of the teachers. In 2002, Agarwal took the mantle of directorship of the institute, and administered the institute single handedly, while shuttling between Mumbai (where Julius moved in 2003) and Chennai. Amidst a tender hint of sadness, the institute was closed in the second half of 2006. Anu  now mostly lives in Mumbai and devotes her time entirely to painting.

A night bird, Anu paints late into the night and sleeps late into the morning / afternoon. Work is often made at the nth hour, just before a show, sometimes over endless drinks of Red Bull that keep her going all night. I enjoy this spontaneity and ease with which she works last minute, never fretting once about not being able to make it, for she always does.

Another admirable facet of her work philosophy is the remarkable attention paid to detail and quality control, not just in the making of the work but also in its presentation. Hence, while most artists would leave the choice of the frame for a painting to their framer “who knows best”, or the gallery; Anu likes to oversee the entire life of the work, right up to the moment it goes up in the gallery. I remember a late August monsoon night in Mumbai last year, when I took Anu Agarwal frame-hunting for her work Off Carter Road, which was to be featured in an exhibition opening the next day. It was late at night, way past 10 pm, and most framers had shut shop, but we called their mobile numbers and got them to open shop for us, so that Anu could find just the perfect frame.

The protagonists in almost all her works are women. Since she identifies with women greatly (not least because she is one herself), she has made a conscious decision to represent women in her works. She comments that the works aim to foreground an understanding of their body language and the many sayings and meanings possible therein; which we may overlook in reality, but which often form the core of her works.

Agarwal paints fearlessly, candidly and boldly. This may well be a legacy from her mentor Julius Macwan, and she has naturally been influenced by his style. Agarwal may have inherited a fair share from Macwan: the bohemia with which subjects are painted, elements of composition, brushwork techniques and other formal elements; but she has never been an imitative painter. Increasingly so, especially in her more recent works, we see the artist coming onto her own, on her way to finding vocabularies that have influences but transcend them. Artist Anjana Mehra who has been watching her work over the last few years agrees: “While earlier works showed a predominant influence of Julius, her more recent works testify that there’s potential and she is evolving a language of her own. The journey has begun...”

Moreover, there is a marked difference in the way Anu handles her subjects. If Macwan tends somewhat to objectify women, even while studying them objectively, and portraying them radically (such a reading of course is complicated and not unanimous); there is a similar tension in Agarwal’s work; and yet an underlying feeling that the latter understands (but of course!) women differently. She has started on a journey of re-imagining women in a way that they have never been imagined in Indian art.

In a monetarily booming (but otherwise mostly stagnant) Indian art scene, painters are dime a dozen, but few display conviction and artistic integrity. Anu is amongst those few rays of hope. The self made artist is on her way to become a young master, in no reactionary hurry to prove her originality as an artist, but reveling in the process of finding her own ground, arming herself to silence all critics; explore, experiment, and create!