A product of the Bodhi Art residency, Nataraj Sharma’s S T R E T C H, an exhibition of paintings and mixed media etchings in paper, pulp and prints, continues to explore the relationships between urbanization, landscapes and the human presence at the interstices of modernity.

The works that form S T R E T C H, are nurtured by a richly hybrid genetic code – printmaking meets collage, topography meets abstraction. The seven suites of mixed-media work that Sharma created during his residency deal with groups of people, both scattered and orderly; images from urban built form and epic-scale machines; abstraction approached in several registers, either a drawing on visions of landscape or on visual output from digital media. Sharma demonstrates to consummate advantage his ability to straddle parallel universes of meaning. While Above Detroit (Winter) is a hymn to serene abstraction, System Error is an abstraction in high spirited, festive mood. Structures, in its several recensions, summons us into the presence of iconic built or colossal engineering devices, delivered either through the purity of etching or as etching modified and enriched by collage and painting inputs. Playground and Flagmarch deal with dynamics of individuals in communities, and are driven by deep questions of what motives bring people together into mass formations, into crowds or assemblies, mobs or armies. Sharma abandons himself to the seduction of color buzz, as he slides along a scale between muted and effulgent, transparent and hard-edged. The scope of individuality lost due to the mechanical reproduction raises an intentional agenda by the artist showing how the dominant forces at play in the current age reduces an individual to a faceless crowd, with potentially disastrous consequences. Sharma is constantly exploring, expanding, and evolving these images so they add new connotations and dimensions to that which was already familiar. This “stretching” is the relentless dynamic in his work. Sharma’s works play with scale in an intriguing and challenging manner for both himself and the onlooker.