Reliving the journey, sharing inspiration

As a part of Talk and Presentation organised in collaboration with Kalakriti Art Gallery, young artists Hetal and Tirumala Tirupathi relived their journey with the Painting department students at Jnafau (Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University, Hyderabad).

Hetal elaborated on the factors that influenced her art, "By the time I was studying my masters, Painting was not limited. It has moved away from the surface. And when you move away from the surface you think of space, time and concepts."

Explaining her inclination for installations, she said that she has moved into abstraction and space and is very interested in doing multidisciplinary projects. Her understanding of painting is quite different. She did not want to limit herself to just painting. She also said she works with immediate expressions. She chiefly explained about one of her project 'Reason not-knot' at Geneva, Switzerland.

“It was a site-specific installation and I worked on a 300-year old attic. Attics hold a great importance in the history of Europe. Holocaust was a terrifying genocide at the time of world war ll. Many families used to hide in the attics of their homes for months,” she related. Hetal picks up concepts from things happening in around her.

Her projects develop around multiple works that simultaneously incorporate a variety of mediums like painting, site specific installation, sculptures, performance, video, various craft techniques that she is deeply involved to bring in to her visual practice and producing a body of work that surfaces from multiple layer of expression.
Tirumala’s works deal with his own visual experiences happening around him.

The everyday lives of people, indulged in various activities, as, a lane of school children in uniform, a queue in a temples, the traditional painting on the threshold of a door, to the scenes of children's play with his unique and simple style of painting. The Telangana artist who also studied at college of fine arts, Jnafau, spoke about how his work is mainly visuals from his own life. It is like a timeline of his life, he said; his work and style are greatly influenced by changes in his life and his situation.

He also made many paintings, which are visuals from his train journeys. Some of his major works are 'Me and Myself' that is like an introduction to his life, 'Amma', 'The Journey', ‘The Gift Box', 'Can We Stop It', 'The playground', 'Switch', 'Door of New Year' and the Hope series. His depiction of the visuals in a painting is quite direct and evidently his works are like the pages of a diary.

- K Sahithi