The Hindu : New Delhi News : An artist's view of life in the Bronze Age

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 23, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

An artist's view of life in the Bronze Age

Bindu Shajan Perappadan

NEW DELHI: Artist Valsan Koorma Kolleri and his unparalleled communicative work titled "New Bronze: Retrospective As Artwork'' on display at Anant Art Gallery in Defence Colony here brings to the Capital an artist's view of life in the Bronze Age.

As Valsan puts it, "for me art is new but everything new is not art. Time is the biggest enemy and cause of worry for most artists. I still live in the Bronze Age and am still grounded to traditional values. I try to showcase values people have forgotten. I have been doing this for the past 30 years now.''

"I am consistently experimenting to create works that call for a more participatory involvement and destroying established conventions of the rarefied museum/gallery space, where the art work, we are often told, cannot be touched,'' he adds.

The artist also claims that he is deeply interested in the idea of work in progress and notes: "My titles almost always carry clues to what is offered to the viewer and I often use materials in combination making each piece unique. I like to match the properties of various substances with and against each other including bronze with granite and stone with terracotta. An art object mostly begins its journey as just a shape in the viewer's mind and slowly the artist experiences its potentially communicative powers, before it finally take shape.''

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