Minal Damani
Minal Damani is one of the young artists who form the famous Triumvirate of Mumbai art scene. The other two being, Prajakta Potnis and Prajakta Palav, these three artists came of age by the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century. Art historically speaking, collapsing three individual artists and their expressions into an imaginary unity is fallacious. Minal Damani creates her art through a personalized idiom like the way her friends have found theirs.
Passed out from Sir J.J.School of Art, Mumbai, Minal Damani started off her career by doing minute pencil drawings, which demanded a physical re-adjustment by the viewer. They were so minute that one had to take them in his hands to see the almost fading kind of imageries. Minal, during her college days had developed an affinity towards the miniature traditions of the East. She invested her intellectual sensibility in these traditions in order to create an idiom embellished with the embroidered decorativeness. Though, from the very beginning Minal resisted creating grand narratives, her earlier works show that she was interested in generating subtle narratives within the pictorial formats.
If one looks at the works of Minal Damani from a feminist perspective (which Minal would perhaps actively debate with a fair amount of suspicion) and also from a subaltern perspective, one could clearly notice that this artist, despite her belongingness to an urban milieu deliberately invokes the traditions of the marginalized (like the craftswomen) both in medium and material. During her formative years Minal has used charcoal and pencil on paper to create the decorative narratives with a kind of fading effect. She could have chosen to work with any other medium. Having probed on this, Minal said that she liked a very personalized approach in creating a work of art, which both physically and mentally demanded a deeper engagement with the medium and material. As the years progressed Minal preferred to work with another ‘old’ medium, Gouache on paper.
Between 2004 and 2006, Minal did a set of works, again using the medium of Gouache on Paper, which had a thematic orientation based on the notions of womanhood and nature. Theoretical contestations that could manifest in the positioning of womanhood along with nature are however played down in Minal’s works. She posits her female protagonists against a wider field of nature, that could comprise sky, foliages, clouds, dream-scapes etc and through these repetitive imageries she asserts the existence of individual woman in the larger scheme of the universe.
During 2006, her preoccupation with figure oriented subtle narratives gave way to more abstract formulations. Minal’s observations on the suburban lives of Mumbai and Baroda became handy to her as she adopted the decorative elements from the contemporary middle class architecture as a part of her visual repertoire. As if she were looking at a particular decoration through a magnifying glass, Minal painted certain elements that gave away the feeling of kaleidoscopic images. The intricate cloud and foliage lines slowly started loosening up to accommodate geometrical forms, scattered with certain deliberation.
Minal seems to have entered a new phase of her creative life with the advent of the year 2007. Marriage with the fellow artist Apurva Nandy has facilitated a shift in her life; a shift from Mumbai to Baroda. Her preparations for the relocation have come to reflect on her works. In the two latest works presented here, Minal deals with the inside-outside, domestic-public debates by juxtaposing a dent in the wall/ceiling amidst the mosaic decorations. She calls it ‘My Floor Your Ceiling’. The ambiguity of image makes the viewer to think about the actual location of the rupture. Similarly, Minal paints two palms (obviously of a bride, could it be her own hands?) with henna decorations. A deep silence surrounds this work and she calls the work, ‘Stains’. She accentuates the ambiguity here also leaving the viewer to come to his/her own conclusions. |
