Exposing the Source:Paintings of Nalini Malani

Tuesday, 30 August 2005 10:28

SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.-The Peabody Essex Museum is pleased to present Exposing the Source: The Paintings of Nalini Malani, approximately 40 works in oil, acrylic, watercolor, and mixed media, as well as video installations. Nalini Malani is one of India’s leading contemporary artists, known for her politically charged work. The paintings in this show are drawn principally from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, considered one of the most important collections of contemporary Indian art outside of Asia. Malani’s powerful, dream-like imagery straddles issues of individual, social, and political identity. Malani’s city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is now the second largest in the world and an ongoing subject of her paintings. The lives of women, the predicaments of gender, and the struggle for voice and power feature prominently in these works. Ancient Greek and Hindu epics, and modern European drama, give additional subtext to Malani’s complex, layered surfaces. “Nalini Malani probes beneath surface appearances to locate essential truths of the human condition. She draws from within herself to expose the depths of human emotion—love, hate, fear, lust, pleasure, aggression, pain,” writes Susan Bean, curator of South Asian and Korean Art, in the introduction to the exhibition. Born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1946 and currently residing in Mumbai, Malani's work has been shown at important exhibitions around the world, including the 2005 Venice Biennale; the 2005 show Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum in New York; the 2003 Istanbul Biennale; and a solo show at The New Museum in New York in 2002. In 2007, Malani will have an international traveling solo show starting at the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The Peabody Essex Museum has been a pioneer in the study and presentation of Indian art in the United States. Shortly after its founding in 1799, the museum began collecting contemporary art and culture from India. Today, its holdings include thousands of works from India, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, including paintings and drawings; works in clay, wood, and metal; embroideries; furniture; and a large collection of 19th- century photographs. The collection also contains important logs, journals, and letters recounting 18th- and 19th-century voyages to India.

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