Jitish Kallat

Jitish Kallat
Jitsh Kallat at the Experimenter Curator's Hub 2015
Born	July 14, 1974 Mumbai, India
Occupation	Artist

Jitish Kallat (born 1974) is an Indian contemporary artist. He currently lives and works in Mumbai, India. Kallat's work includes painting, photography, collage, sculptures, installations and multimedia works. He was the artistic director of the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, held in Fort Kochi in 2014. Kallat is currently represented by Nature Morte -New Delhi, Chemould Prescott Road- Mumbai, ARNDT - Berlin and Galerie Daniel Templon in France and Belgium and he currently sits on the Board of Trustees of the India Foundation for the Arts. Kallat is married to artist Reena Saini Kallat.

Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai, India. In 1996 he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai.

Having received his BFA in painting in 1996, Kallat had his debut solo exhibition titled “PTO” at Chemould Prescott Road. His large-format paintings and drawings already had in them the themes that would recur throughout his work until today. With the self at the centre of an unfolding narrative, these paintings were connected to ideas of time, death, cycles of life, references to the celestial, and familial ancestry. It was only in the next three or four years that an image of the city, otherwise seen at the margins of his paintings, began to take centre stage. In those days Kallat referred to the city street as his university, often carrying within it pointers to the perennial themes of life that have remained a subtext to his work that have taken form in diverse media. "Other indigenous painters before him had flirted with international styles such as Pop (most notably Jyothi Bhatt and Bhupen Khakhar ( and the mix and match of Postmodernism (namely Gulammohammed Sheikh and Atul Dodiya), but no one had turned the textures and surfaces of urban India into the fracture of painting quite so successfully," noted artist, gallerist, and co-director of Nature Morte, Peter Nagy in an essay titled "Jitish Kallat: 21st Century Boy". "Parts of Kallat's canvases appear as if they had been left outdoors during the monsoon season, other sections seem blistered and scorched by the unrelenting sun. The works usually appear much older than they actually are, aged as soon as they are born, not unlike all manner of objects and people through the subcontinent. The distressed and tortured surfaces create a field in which to submerge images while the images themselves are processed and mutilated in a variety of ways. All of which combine to create works that both participate intimately with the artist's mise en scene and comment upon the unique idiosyncrasies of his home. Degradation, bastardisation, the destruction and retrieval of culture and history became Kallat's subjects through the astute handling of both subject matter and technique.