Which Art Show Will You Visit?

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Jhaveri Contemporary
Flat No.2, Krishna Niwas Building, 58A Walkeshwar Road, above the Lakme Salon, Walkeshwar. Tel: 022 2369 3639.
You may want a magnifying glass to truly appreciate the astounding detail in Alexander Gorlizki’s works. The British-born, New York-based artist works with an atelier of skilled miniature painters in Jaipur to craft his tableaux that pull from various traditions including European modernist and Renaissance art (look out for the face of Mona Lisa in one work). So extraordinary is the detailing of pattern—Gorlizki says each of the works can require up to 300 decisions on grid, placement and colour—that it’s only fitting that these artisans are credited on the back of each work. To show the back-and-forth process, Gorlizki has also mounted a “mood board” of sorts (he calls it “the linings of his brain”) against one wall with colour swatches, errant bits of pattern, magazine cut-outs, photographs, sketches and block prints that hint at the complexity of the collaborative process.
Until: Saturday, November 3.

Chemould Prescott Road Gallery
Queen’s Mansion, Third Floor, G. T. Marg, Fort. Tel: 022 2200 0211.
Two decades after her first solo show, at Gallery Chemould, Anju Dodiya returns with a body of pencil and water colour works titled “Room for Erasures” that play on old concerns, primary among them “self-doubt”. There is a clawing sense of desperation to some of these works: in one a school girl with a pencil in her mouth appears to be reaching for something; in another a woman is mauled by faceless beasts; while in a third series of pencil self-portraits, the “adult viewer” is asked to erase parts of them (or as as much of it as you like). Whether you can put hand to paper, and literally erase the artist’s identity, is Dodiya’s prime challenge; the viewer is left confronting the task that demands a certain purposeful recklessness and inconsideration.
Until: Friday, October 26.

Gallery Maskara
Warehouse on Third Pasta, 6/7 Third Pasta Lane, Colaba. Tel: 022 2202 3056.
Two years ago, for his show titled “Shelf-Life“, Prashant Pandey used urine, sweat, tears, expired chocolate and cigarette butts to craft his delicate yet monstrous works, using them to comment on the perishable nature of life itself. Now back with a sequel, called “Shelf-Life II”, Pandey has toned down the icky material—the most offensive medium is chunks of road—while still continuing his exploration of decay and decomposition. In “Black Moon”, hunks of road tar are placed in circular formation, the sole touch of symmetry in this jagged ugly form (which, come to think of it, works as a great symbol for the city of Mumbai). More alluring is a hanging giant heart made of white marble chips; Pandey is descended from a family of marble sculptors, and with this work, titled simply “Love” the familiarity of the cliche is nimbly subverted. This is no sweet pure heart; it’s an amalgam of discarded parts, sharp little pieces that serve a purpose no more.
Until: Thursday, November 8.

Art Musings
1 Admiralty Building, Colaba Cross Lane, Colaba. Tel: 022 2216 3339.
For her second solo at Art Musings “Feasting & Fasting”, Smriti Dixit has fashioned a site-specific spider’s web titled “Trap” (presumably the “feasting” half indicated in the show title). Except, there’s no beastly menace hiding in this web—it’s been spun entirely of plastic tag fasteners, where the menace is in the material and the damage it wreaks on our environment. Look at it another way, and it could simply be a statement on our insatiable desire to consume, leaving us trapped in a cocoon of our own (springy) making.
Until: Monday, October 15.