While Egyptian papyri, medieval European illuminated manuscripts and Indian books of miniatures are among historical forms that utilise both words and paintings, the combination of text and image in one integrated whole is primarily a legacy of advertising. Unsurprisingly, a number of visual artists who employed text had a background in commercial graphic design, René Magritte, Andy Warhol and Barbara Kruger among them. priyanka choudhary follows in that tradition, having built a successful career in advertising following her B.F.A. degree before devoting herself to art full-time.
Her present series of word-paintings and sculptures was triggered by a performance-based residency in Antwerp in 2019 which led her to try expressing deep anxieties on paper before transferring a selection onto canvas. The next step in that exercise occurred in early 2023, when she began working with a voice coach in an attempt to scream, an effort tied to other constraints she wanted to shrug off. An unexpected side-effect of the therapy was that her formerly monochromatic paintings began to burst with colour.
The artist’s first two solo shows in 2010 and 2011 at Gallery Maskara included sculptural pieces composed of bamboo, bricks, nails, concrete blocks and shards of glass. Construction sites continue to fascinate her, and contributed some unusual materials like clay, plaster, and stones to her recent paintings. Twigs, henna, fabric, and gold dust also found their way onto the canvas, as did coal ash collected from burnt-out winter fires lit by security guards on Delhi’s streets.
choudhary chooses neutral typography for the most part, but her words carry an emotional weight missing in the dispassionate attitude adopted by precursors like Magritte, Warhol and Kruger. She frequently speaks in the first person while eschewing straightforward autobiography, keeping her pronouncements delicately poised some way short of the confessional art of Tracey Emin. What she shares with Emin is a preoccupation with the embodied female experience.
She builds her compositions through a series of additions and erasures, vigorously scrubbing parts of the surface, writing, rewriting and brushing on paint and powdered pigment mixed with binders, imbuing the finished works with a sense of the creative tussle between opposed impulses of revealing and concealing. The voice that emerges, by turns accusatory and plaintive, is of a defiant outsider questioning the customs obeyed and abstract principles celebrated by conventional society.
- Girish Shahane
