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Prabhavathi Meppayil: An artistic practice that defies genres
Summary
Prabhavathi Meppayil’s solo show at Jhaveri Contemporary highlights meditative works that play with sculptural mark-making
Coinciding with the recently held Art Mumbai, Jhaveri Contemporary opened Prabhavathi Meppayil’s eponymous first solo exhibition in Mumbai after 17 years. While Bengaluru-based Meppayil has kept a relatively low profile in her own country, she has been making waves internationally over the years. She was the only Indian artist to be represented at the 2013 Venice Biennale at its centrally curated pavilion. In 2016, she was part of the group exhibition, Accrochage, at the Punta Della Dogana in the same city alongside other contemporary artists like Tacita Dean, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. She also exhibited at Kochi Biennale that year, followed by the Yokohama Triennale in 2017, Sydney Biennale in 2018 and the Dhaka Art Summit in 2020. She also had two celebrated exhibitions with Pace Gallery in London in 2014 and New York in 2022, and with Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin in 2018.
Her initial inspiration stemmed from wall paintings, ranging from the Shekhawati murals in Rajasthan to the frescoes at the Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad. She trained with mural artists to learn the technique. Eventually she moved on to gesso ( a primer which she uses as paint), which turned out to be a completely different medium with its own set of challenges. More profoundly, her family heritage in goldsmithing informs her practice in myriad ways.
I recently visited Meppayil’s studio in the metalworking district in Chickpet in Bengaluru. While the narrow lanes leading to her studio are decidedly chaotic, her studio is serene and organised. That sense of assured preciseness has flown into her works, which draw you in through their minimalist compositions but captivate through their subtle intensity of repetitive, sculptural mark-making.
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The multiple works in this exhibition made of copper wire embedded in gesso panel particularly bring out the essence of her practice. The panel itself is made of layers of up to 15-20 coats of gesso, carried out through repeated rounds of application and drying. Gradually it acquires a subtle, glossy surface which feels like an object by itself. “You have to know the materiality deeply and the possibilities, to what extent you can stretch a metal like gold or copper, for example. After inserting the metal wire, another ten coats of gesso go in. Once dry, they are put through sanding and polishing. One cannot go too far because then the wire could break," she says. The end result is that in some places the copper wire is covered, and exposed elsewhere.
A set of works which underscore the labour and time-intensive nature of her works are the ones involving thinnam marks on gesso panels. Thinnams are traditional tools used to stamp patterns on metal by goldsmiths, which the artist has used to delicately press into the white gesso, patiently building a visual language that both pays homage to modernist minimalism and questions it.
Consistent with her engagement with geometric forms, the three stark copper-embedded concrete sculptures from 2019 take inspiration from smaller jewellery-making moulds. “It is a scaled-up sculptural version of the tools which I used in my installation for the Sydney Biennial in 2018, but in a contrasting material like concrete. The larger geometric forms (of the tools) speak to architecture with their defining planes and volume; and the idea of a space within a space. I could even imagine these tools in a scaled-up version creating interesting spatial relationships," Meppayil adds.
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In her current exhibition, she has also focused on found objects, which often form the basis for her geometric and grid-based works. On the main wall in the second room in the gallery is m/twenty one (2024), a large installation comprising pigmented gesso panels and handmade polishing stones which are used as tools. “I was intrigued by their (the polishing stones’) tactile quality and the dialogue between the pigmented gesso panel and the found object, the everyday," she says.
m/fifteen (2023) is an array of small wooden cubes attached to a gesso-layered canvas. Called polla achch in Malayalam (polla for the scooped-up metal and achch for the mould), these cubes with concave depressions were originally used by goldsmiths for making spherical shapes like beads, jhumkas and earring back screws. “For me, a series of these found objects which are coated with gesso simulate a scaled-up version of thinnam panel. In an earlier version of the work, I had installed the cubes directly on the wall, as a way of mark-making," says the artist whose works explore the ambiguities between painting and sculpture.
There has been a tendency to fit her practice into the abstract-minimalist school that flourished out of the US in the 1960s and 1970s. While that has invited comparisons with eminent artists like Agnes Martin or closer home with Nasreen Mohamedi, Meppayil’s work defies easy categorisation through her use of traditional artisanal tools like thinnam and practices derived from her goldsmithing background. “Whether it is the gesso, the copper or gold wires, or the concrete cement, in my works, material is form but material is also colour," she asserts.
The exhibition in on till 21 December at Jhaveri Contemporary, Colaba, Mumbai.
Anindo Sen is an independent art and culture writer.
