As a descendant of goldsmiths that spans several generations, Prabhavathi Meppayil is an artist who creates works that feature a distinct touch of a craftsman.
Presented at Pace Gallery, Meppayil’s first solo exhibition titled Recent Works at 6 Burlington Gardens features a new body of work that is described as being inflected with an element of chance, minimalist formulas and intermissions with a profoundly transcendental dimension specific to the setting.
“Meppayil’s linear designs in her work are not engendered by manual artisanal means or painterly processes: drawing, facture, and gesture originating either from pointed indentations or from linear metal insertions that singularly define graphic structures,” said art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. “Meppayil’s paintings seem to be driven by a latent desire to leave behind the parameters of pictorial space and its supporting surfaces, reaching for an ultimate sublation of the painterly rectangle in a numinous architectural space.”
The focal point of Meppayil’s Recent Works exhibition is her large installation titled sb/eighteen that is composed of gesso and 875 found iron, copper and brass tools that are fitted on a white wall.
Arranged in a low-relief grid pattern, the iron, copper and brass tools used conventionally by goldsmiths are said by Pace Gallery to allude “postwar abstraction where geometric structures were often used to facilitate non-hierarchical methods of organisation”.
“By taking tools that are commonly used in the artisanal process, most of which are obsolete and dislodged from their original purpose, Meppayil reiterates them as art objects while also retaining vestiges of their individual histories,” said Pace Gallery. “This process also emphasizes their materiality and simple forms.”
