Anarchitecture

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present Shezad Dawood’s Anarchitecture, the artist’s second solo exhibition in the US. Featuring a new series of textile paintings inspired by the noted Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond’s projects in India and Japan, the artist takes viewers on a thought-provoking journey that examines transcultural influences and the intersections between Eastern and Western schools of art, architecture, and philosophy.

In 1921, Frank Lloyd Wright dismissed Raymond as his chief assistant on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for questioning Wright’s consideration and understanding of Japanese culture and traditions. Antonin Raymond went on to set up his own architectural practice in Japan, and in 1935 was invited to design the dormitories of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry—a beautifully understated but oft-overlooked and underappreciated synthesis of modernist architecture in India.

It is from this building, and specifically from its iconic window shutters, that Shezad Dawood takes his inspiration for the new paintings presented in Anarchitecture. Playing with the concepts of light and shade, positive and negative, the artist examines the relationship between Raymond’s incorporation of Japanese and Indian ideals into his work as an architect, as well as the discourse around negation in the Kyoto school of philosophy and its reconfiguring of a more positivist Kantian formulation. Dawood’s works also manifest the artist’s deep interest in a variety of philosophers, expressing the tension of basic formulations such as “both/and” and “either/or” posed by Schopenhauer and Heidegger, whose roots can be found in the Indian logician Nagarjuna of the 2nd and 3rd century. Stripped back, but by no means austere, this series of paintings celebrates color as a vital principle in Dawood’s aesthetics of negation. 

Alongside the new textile paintings, carefully considering and utilizing the gallery itself as an architectural construct, Dawood is also presenting two wall-mounted neon sculptures that form part of his on-going, related research into Modernist Architecture, Indian spirituality and tantric forms: Pondicherry Mon Amour (after Antonin Raymond) andI.A.M, both from 2011.

On May 3, from 6 - 7:30 PM, the artist will be present at Jane Lombard Gallery for a book signing and talk with Shanay Jhaveri to celebrate the publication of Jhaveri’s new book, Chandigarh is in India.