Radhika Agarwala Exhibition at Hearbeat Gallery

About

Working with a variety of mediums including painting, drawings and sculpture, Radhika Agarwala's work ushers the viewer into her world by creating a vibrant and striking abstract tapestry weaved from mytho-logy and folklore. Distorting the lines between reality and fantasy, she creates images that are delicate and poetic, yet, vivid and exciting to view. There is a strong sense of Diaspora in Agarwala's body of work, which reflects her Indian origins, yet also gravitates towards the visual vocabulary of Western culture. In her work Agarwala appropriates visual motifs from the sacred icons and friezes that can be found in Calcutta, the city of her birth. These sources hybridise subject matter with ornamentation, historical accounts with mythology, and stories and styles that relate to different parts of the country. From this dense and heterogeneous imagery she creates anthropomorphic and bestial motifs, drenched in an array of rich colours and thick, layered textures that create a strong, resonating impact on the spectator. Within the artist's paintings, Hindu iconography is intermingled with the visual vocabulary of Western geometric painting. The result is a constant clashing of narratives within Radhika Agarwala's work: popular culture and identity; the sacred and the mundane; fantasy and the factual. Playing with notions of hybridism, Agarwala employs a cast of cross-cultural and cross-historical references that blend reality with consciousness in a disarming statement that evokes captivating familiarity on different levels to diverse viewers. Radhika Agarwala, b. 1985 in India, MFA Fine Art Goldsmiths, University of London 2011, Post Baccalaureate in Painting from School of The Art Institute of Chicago 2008 and BFA Rabindra Bharati University, Faculty of Visual Arts, Calcutta 2007. She has shown widely across UK,à‚ USA and India. At present she lives and works in London.