Young artists who sold well at India Art Fair '18

Anwar Chitrakar | This Midnapore artist used to be a tailor but gave it up to resurrect West Bengal’s folksy Kalighat Pat. In Chitrakar’s contemporary pats, Bengali babus and their bibis don chic Western wear, take selfies, ride bikes. Chitrakar also borrows from the Patachitra and Mithila styles to detail the drawings. His artworks have been displayed at international festivals and won him the 2006 President’s Award and 2002 State Award by the Government of West Bengal.

Janarthanan R | While on the quest to explore the idea of the self in the physical and metaphysical realm, the 33-year-old Chennai-based artist found many similarities between the human body and a bird’s nest. The result of this scrutiny: larger-than-life iron sculptures of the human form, shown in various yogic poses, reflect a finely layered core, marveled by many.

Jignesh Panchal | Making an image of an image of an image of what was there. In this way, the work is at once distortion, testimony and manipulation in the same frame,” says Panchal of his cobalt blue-and-white layered paper works in acrylic paint which depict abstracted images of urban settings. They represent multiple approaches of witnessing a space/object

Kulu Ojha | The undulating landscape of Ojha’s works, which looks like some archaeological excavations, is made purely from memory. The Orissa-bred, Ahmedabad-based artist comes from a family of carpenters, and began working in wood before progressing to acid-free paper of various thicknesses and adhesives that he made himself from organic materials. It was a complete sell-out for Ojha at IAF.

Sahil Naik | This 26-year-old’s work at the Experimenter booth brought in an element of realism as expressed in his sculptural installation, a recreation of the interior of the run-down kitchen of an old home. Dead cities, dead spaces – evoking decay because they’ve been abandoned is what inspires Naik.

Sanjoy Barot | Sanjay Barot’s large canvases are a thicket of fine lines which, upon closer inspection, reveal mystics, kings, commoners and havelis. Partly biographical, Barot’s paintings record his migration from Kapadvanj (a small town in Kheda district of Gujarat and also Tyeb Mehta’s birthplace), to Baroda, a city he loves and lives in.

Lal Bahadur Singh | Singh’s artworks are reflective of his rural upbringing in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, where he studied art in nature under a traditional ‘guru’. His parrot series humanises the bird, and mimics the changing urban landscape. Word is that the Jindals and Adanis own a few of his works. Singh gains inspiration from his travels to rural India.

Dhruv Malhotra | An insomniac, this 33-year-old artist is given to wandering the streets of Delhi, photographing the city as it sleeps. The collateral IAF exhibition called Mutations showed construction labourers sleeping atop the precarious scaffolding, on which they work by day, Delhi’s homeless asleep on the grassy kerbs that line its wide streets, cycling rickshaw drivers curled up on their vehicles, and so on. This is Malhotra’s second project in the City by Night series.

Subir Hati | As recipient of the 2016 Glenfiddich’s Emerging Artist of the Year award, Hati fashioned bugs from metal painted in gold and laced in enamel during a three-month artist residency at the Scotland distillery. Hati’s Axis Denied series of ‘jewel’ bugs squashes the notion that there’s only one focal point to a perspective or that things stay stable forever. Hati hails metamorphosis, change born out of restlessness, and stresses that the background is as important as the foreground.

Tara Kelton | Hmour is a rare ingredient in Indian contemporary art. The works of this US-origin, Bangalore-based artist and designer called Death By, depicted the interface of art, social behaviour (tradition) and technology. For instance, a painting, Untitled, is done in oil paint, but the blurred image that it depicts is that of an artwork found inside Google street view of a painting in a New York City gallery.