Born in Mysore, India, Nataraj Sharma grew up in Egypt, England and Zambia. This hybrid lifestyle may also have given him a sense of the socio-political differences and cultural influences of rapidly modernising cities. The multi-media artist works fluidly between intallation, painting and digital art, drawing on the appropriationist tendencies of Warhol and Duchamp, whilst maintaining a dialogue with the Bombay Progressive Artists Group of the 1990s. His large scale installations are often evocative of the frenzy of construction found in many urban Indian cities. Sharma offers a conflicted view of these developments: his use of miniaturisation is gently mocking of societies that adopt western modernity as a standard of cultural acheivement. On the other hand his works are monuments to that very ideal.
Read MoreCombining two strands in Indian visual history, Sharma seeks to create a dialogue around the notion of historical progress and urban realities. The narative tradition of figuration, with its focus on emerging middle-class aspirations, and the geometric abstraction of Indian modernist painters is suffused within his vocabulary.
