Nalini Malani was introduced to reverse painting in 1988 while making a mural with fellow artists Bhupen Khakhar and Vivan Sundaram. Bhupen Khakhar, newly back from Hungary where he acquired the skill, offered to teach the other two to reverse paint for the project. Since then, this technique has become a mainstay of Malani’s body of work. Malani says of her conceptual and art historical interest in reverse painting, “It was very close to a... Nalini Malani was introduced to reverse painting in 1988 while making a mural with fellow artists Bhupen Khakhar and Vivan Sundaram. Bhupen Khakhar, newly back from Hungary where he acquired the skill, offered to teach the other two to reverse paint for the project. Since then, this technique has become a mainstay of Malani’s body of work. Malani says of her conceptual and art historical interest in reverse painting, “It was very close to a technique that was brought to South India by the Chinese traders in the 18th century, where they sold postcard size erotic images. The Tanjore painters were very enamoured with the medium and [until today] still practise it. They changed the erotic nature of the imagery into the sacred, which for me was a very interesting change. I wanted to bring back the profanity into the medium. So it was a bit of serendipity when Bhupen told me that he could teach me this technique, I was only more than willing to have him as my tutor.” (Artist quoted in an interview with Ambika Rajgopal, “Myth, Metaphor & Women | Interview with Nalini Malani”, Art Radar, 21 March 2014, online accessed via ambikarajgopal.co)

The present lot is a mixed media reverse painting from her Nursery Tales series that suitably unearths the uncomfortable strain of violence in the original fairytales before they were defanged in the 19th century. Malani refuses to offer a straightforward narrative, rather providing a procession of images that unfurl like a tapestry. Critic Nancy Adajania notes, “The details in Malani’s paintings are not elements that add up to a tidy whole. Each detail is a story in itself, like a glyph you could recognise but are not equipped to read and understand… she feeds off the quirkiness and violence integral to purportedly innocent nursery rhymes and fairy tales… Malani was intrigued by the horror and cruelty woven into children’s tales, visible and audible even through the sanitizations of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault.” (“Three Artists in Pursuit of a Once and Future World”, Nancy Adajania, Excavation: Memory / Myth / Membrane, Mumbai: Art Musings, 2008)

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