By IANSlife

February 11, 2023 (IANSlife) A brand-new body of work by the dynamic Delhi-based artists Thukral and Tagra is on display at the India Art Fair 2023. As you approach the India Art Fair, their display of oil on canvas is hard to miss because it is situated directly outside.

The India Art Fair is a premier venue for showcasing and discovering modern and contemporary art and artists from all across South Asia, providing a singular entry point to the vibrant cultural scene in the area. The expo, which takes place yearly in New Delhi, the capital of India, honours contemporary South Asia by fusing cutting-edge contemporary visual art with modern masters and regional artistic traditions.

The fair's programme, places art and the artist's voice at its core, bringing together galleries and institutions, private foundations and arts charities, artists' collectives and national museums, as well as cultural events and festivals, allowing local and international audiences to engage in creative ways with the region's cultural history and development.

The body of art being presented by Thukral and Tagra is a continuation of their most recent exhibition, Arboretum, which is on view at the Nature Morte gallery in Dhanmill through February 26. The paintings on display at Arboretum frequently include green flora that glitches and folds again on top of itself, while other features blur into pixels. Abstract characters are hidden behind the leaves, watching you as you watch them while drawing comparisons to actual life. The series' provocative theme, according to Sumir Tagra, is "if there is genuinely any retreat from being seen."

Photo-realistic details are painted The arboretum turns the need to take pictures around and extends time into reflection, depicting flowers as objects of contemplative adoration. The orderly grouping of elements and the use of dots as visual breaks across the paintings demonstrate the painters' sense of logging data. This series, like all of their earlier work, deals with the shifting social standards that exist in this environment as well as the more permeable lines separating online and offline life.

Always pushing on expanding the boundaries and formats of public engagement and what art can do, the idea of this show was conceived from the studio that Thukral and Tagra refer to as a greenhouse. The artists question how this world should be. To counter how a new public forum can evade glitches that were once commonplace, the Jiten Thukral emphasises, “like gardeners, we pick at the weeds, turn over the soil, water the plants, and the Arboretum will bloom.”

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