copyright 2008 Nitin Mukul

Nitin Mukul: I Woke Up Somewhere Else The Guild, NY  | NYC  |  June 19 - July 17, 2008 opening reception: Thursday, June 19  6:30 - 8:30pm Opening on June 19, 2008, The Guild, NY, is pleased to present  "I Woke Up Somewhere Else," an exhibition of paintings by New Delhi-based artist Nitin Mukul, whose work negotiates the tense and productive spaces between geographies, visual cultures and identities. Mukul paints with the sensibility of a postcolonial transplant, combining pop cultural references from India's media-saturated visual environment with biological structures, ritual images and architecture. New Delhi's urban landscape figures strongly in these paintings, a city where protean slippage is the norm: between the man-made and the natural, between the legal, semi-legal and illegal, between migrants and residents. This stubborn resistance to enduring impositions of identity, order and classification spills over onto Mukul's canvases, where dense knots of jury-rigged electric cables sprawling out of a transformer box simultaneously evoke the clustered networks of arteries in a human body and the ad hoc informality of Delhi's explosive urban growth. In another piece an image of a domed fifteenth-century tomb from Delhi's Hauz Khas neighborhood has been sampled, flipped and transfigured into a disco ball diptych that seems to emerge from a dusty, psychedelic sunset. Mukul's hybrid use of oils, acrylics and washes of black tea picks up on these thematic interests, creating a complex, densely layered painted surface where materials mingle and confront each other from discrete historical and art historical positions. Mukul's restless images pull in and out of focus, sharpening and withdrawing, excavating their way through the sediments of individual and urban history, mapping a migrant's passages across shifting, unpredictable borderlands. Mukul was included in the landmark exhibition Fatal Love at the Queens Museum of Art in NYC in 2005 and has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art India magazine. He had a fellowship at the Kanoria Centre for the Arts, Ahmed- abad in 2003. He has worked as an assistant for the late American minimalist artist Sol Lewitt and was a former Creative Director at the Indocenter of Art & Culture in NYC. Recently he performed in Fluxus events at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art with Ben Patterson, one of the Fluxus group’s founding members. The Guild, NY 45 West, 21st Street 2nd Floor (Rear), Suite 39, New York, NY 10010 Telephone: 1 212 229 2110   info@theguildny.com   |  http://www.theguildny.com read full essay here