Gallery Espace presented ‘Architectonics of the Everyday: Monuments and Memory’, Dilip Chobisa’s first one-person exhibition at Gallery Espace from July 12 – to August 12, 2024. The show will feature recent works, foregrounding Chobisa’s drawing practice. These will include paperwork and canvas drawings of various sizes in Chobisa’s muted palette and three-dimensional wall sculptures.
Baroda-based Chobisa’s art practice engages with the poetics of built space, especially the vernacular architecture one sees all over rural India and in the old quarters of cities – low-rise structures characterised by domed roofs, arched doorways, ornamental window grilles, and cement mosaic floors. For Chobisa, the ordering and construction of spaces and structure elements are extensions of the human psyche and manifestations of social hierarchy. He reproduces them in his artworks, coloured by nostalgia and shaded by chiaroscuro, their forms and textures recreated painstakingly with precise attention to authenticity.
“Dilip’s works in this show signal new directions in his practice. While architecture continues to dominate his works and human figures are conspicuous by their absence, plants and trees have begun featuring in them significantly. His drawings are exquisite, painstakingly, and delicately rendered as the wall sculptures and tiles he is identified with”, Renu Modi, founder-director of Gallery Espace, speaks on the show.
Dilip Chobisa is an alumnus of the M.S. University in Baroda. He has been a part of several solo and group exhibitions, noteworthy among which are ‘Working Space—Around Memory and Perception’ (2015) at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, ‘Ethereal’ (2014) at Leila Heller Gallery, London, and ‘Fragile’ (2012) at Paradox Gallery, Singapore. He has executed public art projects at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Commission, Mumbai [2013], and Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi [2011]. He was awarded the Harmony Art Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year in 2008. His works are in the collections of the Devi Art Foundation, the R.P.G. Collection, Harmony Art Foundation, Uttrayan Foundation, Patrons of Tel Aviv Museum, and Gwangju Museum of Art, among others.
