Mona Rai

NATURE MORTE

287, 288, 100 Feet Rd, Chhatarpur Hills, New Delhi 110074

Tel: +91 11 40687117 e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Multiple location : Neuss New Delhi(2)

Art Dubai

Madinat Jumeirah Conference & Events Centre King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud St Al Sufouh 1 Dubai United Arab Emirates

T +971 4 563 1400 e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

March 11 > 13, 2022

Mona Rai was born in 1947, New Delhi, the city where she continues to live and work. She received a Master’s in Psychology at Delhi University and studied art at Triveni Kala Sangam. Rai is an abstractionist who explores the expressive potential of different materials such as metallic leaves, fabrics, glitter, sand, gravel, dirt and ash in her paintings and works on paper. Her process is rooted in risk-taking. Many of her works resemble battlegrounds: scorched, trampled, slit, wounded, scratched, scarred, bleeding, and weeping, to rend objects into emotional states and aesthetic consciousness. At other times, she creates shimmering fields of colors that dazzle and oscillate in the light, with imagery informed by craft production and ritual art forms. Rai takes inspiration from her environment, responding to nature and its manifestations in the animal, vegetable and mineral realms; and science, language, and their proliferation through technological means.
The set of nine new works on paper Rai made in 2021 for this presentation in Dubai are specific and seem to defy the time it took to create them, stemming more from an immobility than any actions. While they utilise a wide variety of materials they all share a brutal honesty, acting as a sort of empirical evidence or verification of her being, her reality of making marks on to papers. Rai’s marks make a picture which is also the object and stands as a testimony of her perceptions.
But the artist is not always in control of or even aware of her perceptions and, given the proper time and space, extrasensory abilities can be tapped into. Extrasensory experience is also natural and perhaps aesthetics are a heightened sense of awareness of our own super cognition. This group of nine new works on paper are joined by a single work from 2015 entitled “Getting Tangled with the Stars,” which is larger than the others, but whose imagery is complementary.
The centrepiece of the booth will be a large, three-panel work on canvas from 2010 entitled “Kaal.” With this work, one witnesses Rai’s extraordinary ability to coalesce a wide variety of disparate materials into a cohesive whole. Small squares of brocade fabrics are combined with mirrors, metallic foils, strings, and screws to create a “painting” that accommodates both the handcraft found in the villages of India and the ritual forms found in its temples. The language of Rai’s abstraction is derived equally from expressionism and minimalism, while the triptych format imparts a greater sense of polyphony. In this, as in all of her works, we can sense something of Rai’s early studies in psychology with her embrace of nuance, emotion, and introspection.
In the course of her expansive career, Rai has participated in multiple national and international shows including Nature Morte, New Delhi (2021, 2017, 2014, 2010, 2004); Gallery Maya, London (2006); Gallery F.I.A., Amsterdam (1997, 1993); Gallery Espace, New Delhi (1992); Gallery Augustine, Hofheim (1991); Sakshi Gallery, Madras (1991); Gallery Aurobindo, New Delhi (1988); Triveni Gallery, New Delhi (1984, 1974); Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi (1980, 1978, 1977, 1976, 1975, 1974) and Gallery Chemould, Mumbai (1979). She has also shown at Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, (2001-2002); BK Kunstforum, Dusseldorf (2001-2002); Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Cheltenham, UK (1995-1996); National Gallery of Modern Art (1986) and Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan (1984). Her work was featured in the 9th Norwegian International Print Triennial, Norway (1989); the Bharat Bhawan Biennial, India (1988); the 17th International Biennial of Graphic Art, Yugoslavia (1987) and the 15th Tokyo Biennale, Japan (1984).