SHEETAL GATTANI
Born 1968 in Mumbai, India.
Lives and works in Mumbai, India.
Having trained at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, Gattani poured her methodical strategies into evocative watercolors before moving on to explore her idiom in other mediums. The artist maintains her studio in a bustling commercial pocket of Mumbai, and the resultant studio practice takes on the qualities of a kind of meditation and disassociation from self. In a metropolis with overwhelming visual and aural stimuli, the works offer a liminal space from which one might glean a fragile sense of empathy and solitude.
Like her works on paper, Gattani’s canvases are painted over and over in multiple layers. While the canvases fit neatly into the vocabulary of process-based abstraction, more than meets the eye in one’s experience of them. The subtle architectural conceits – achieved by pasting canvas to articulated board – and complete absence of gesture make the works feel enigmatic and almost inevitable.
Born in Mumbai in 1968, lives and works in Mumbai.
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (1), 2008, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 36 x 72 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (2), 2012, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 36 x 72 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (3), 2012, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 72 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (4), 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 72 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (5), 2010, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 36 x 72 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (6), 2007, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 48 x 48 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (7), 2008, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 48 x 96 in (diptych)
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (8), 2008, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 48 x 96 in (diptych)
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (9), 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 36 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (10), 2007, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board, 72 x 48 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (11), 1995, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (12), 1996, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (14), 1998, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (15), 1998, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (19), 1999, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (20), 2000, Watercolor on black paper, 11 x 11 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (21), 2019, Charcoal and dry pastel on archival paper, 14 x 14 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (23), 2019, Charcoal and dry pastel on archival paper, 14 x 14 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (26), 2019, Charcoal and dry pastel on archival paper, 14 x 14 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (29), 2019, Charcoal and dry pastel on archival paper, 14 x 14 in
Sheetal Gattani, Untitled (30), 2019, Charcoal and dry pastel on archival paper, 14 x 14 in
The traffic island garden, which sees heavy traffic going to North and South Mumbai, now hosts a 10-foot-high installation of two hands, each holding a glass of ‘cutting chai’
New Canvases — that’s the simple title, shorn of thematic references. But the new canvases of Sheetal Gattani, presented by Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, at its recent show — both in the gallery and online — overturned the very idea of ‘new’ being virgin, untarnished territory.
