RASSEGNA MIART 2019

foglio sheet 3/4 A 15/04/2019 web web 31/05/19, 13)09 Sheela Gowda at the HangarBicocca | Apollo Magazine Pagina 3 di 14 https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sheela-gowda-pirelli-hangarbicocca/ And That Is No Lie (2015) and It Stands Fallen (2015–16), Sheela Gowda. Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca The show offers a series of high points in Gowda’s career. At the entrance we are met by a large canopy of bright red cotton with a zigzag outline like bunting. In this amalgamation of two earlier works, And That is No Lie (2015) and It Stands Fallen (2015–16), the metal poles the fabric is insecurely tied to surge up into the darkness, gesturing to the magnificent architecture the structure inhabits, while metres of fabric lie collapsed on the ground. The canopy is intended to evoke a shamiana or pandal , temporary tent-like structures put up in India during secular and religious events, here surging upward but also tumbling down, dismantling, spilling a sea of red. The second installation, Kagebangara (2008), looks like a deconstructed modernist painting, with two blue and one yellow tarpaulin rectangles hung on a metal wall playing against an arrangement of rusted rectangle metal sheets. These frame a small house-like structure made from beaten metal, outside of which the lids of tar drums are used as bowls containing sheets of mica, a building material, which also suggests water. In front are two columns of stacked drums. Metaphor and abstraction are in exact balance with the material facts of a building site. Kagebangara (2008), Sheela Gowda. Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca Tar drums have become a core material for Gowda, recurring here in A Blanket and the Sky (2004), Chimera (2004) and Darkroom (2006). Inspired by the way road workers turn the tar barrels into shelters at the side of the road, Gowda has constructed her own towering structures, which visitors can enter, and pierced holes in the roofs to create a starlit sky. The installation What Yet Remains (2017), meanwhile, presents an array of blue, red, yellow and green painted, recycled metal drum sheets, many of which have eight-inch-wide circular holes where metal discs have been punched out. The metal discs have been beaten into bowls called bandlis , used for carrying building materials. Close by is Stopover (2012), a site-specific installation conceived for the first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, composed of around 200 traditional spice-grinding stones, once considered sacred, which Gowda saved from abandonment on the streets of Bangalore. Once again, their formal qualities sing in counterpoint with their cultural significance. Pagina 1 di 14 a-pirelli-hangarbicocca/ her extraordinary works made out of everyday 15 APRIL2019 sio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan