TARQ is delighted to present Pratap Morey’s first solo exhibition — ‘measure | decipher.’ Comprising several new works, ‘measure | decipher’ seeks to examine the artist’s preoccupation with changing geographies of urban spaces. Pratap has lived and worked in Mumbai for the most part of his life, and has been constantly displaced by the city’s shifting façades. He seeks inspiration from his immediate surroundings, exploring the spatial existence of its residents and the dualism of a colossal urban sprawl where vacant spaces are rapidly transformed into formidable structures.
The artist uses a combination of digital photographic images, archival prints, architectural drawings and engravings in his intricate paper works. Each work delves into the overarching themes of construction, redevelopment and displacement — which are immediate concerns in a contemporary urban environment. The radical proliferation of urban spaces is an urgency that Pratap’s practice abstracts and presents to the viewer in his version of relief sculpture. The structural elevations in his works are restrained deliberations to amplify and reveal movement and metamorphosis as well as create an illusion of voids. He uses the structural nature of his works as a tool to create space, utilizing formal structures like corners and the three-point perspective to draw the viewer into each of his works.
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| Artist: Pratap Morey |
The artist uses a combination of digital photographic images, archival prints, architectural drawings and engravings in his intricate paper works. Each work delves into the overarching themes of construction, redevelopment and displacement — which are immediate concerns in a contemporary urban environment. The radical proliferation of urban spaces is an urgency that Pratap’s practice abstracts and presents to the viewer in his version of relief sculpture. The structural elevations in his works are restrained deliberations to amplify and reveal movement and metamorphosis as well as create an illusion of voids. He uses the structural nature of his works as a tool to create space, utilizing formal structures like corners and the three-point perspective to draw the viewer into each of his works.
According to architect Kaiwan Mehta, “The absurdity of the gap between the real and the projected is played out as drawings sit on photographs, measuring and deciphering a reality that is everyday and there, yet not acknowledged, recognisable but never accounted, never drawn out as a documentation of the life and cities we occupy - making reality - unreal. As the real and unreal, material and surreal, shape our spaces of existence and living, the non-architectural architecture that shapes the city emerges in the concreteness of architectural drawings.
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| Recent work by Pratap Morey |
The sense of distance we adopt towards our everyday living, finding refuge in landscapes of dream- trajectories, produces cities that exist (only) in the realms of near-fictional domains and topographies, while the everyday material world, with its material-reality gets relegated to a topography of denial, the urgent wish to de-recognise it out of some sense of shame or refutation. This space we exist (and live) in between insistent occupation of a projected fantasy and the hurried denial of the everyday reality produces citizens that have lost a sense of measure - the measure of what it means to participate in human worlds, life and death, reflections and arguments, files and books, sleepwalking and reading
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| Recent work by Pratap Morey |
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pratap Morey is a Mumbai-based artist with a post-graduate diploma in Indian Aesthetics from Mumbai University and a graduate degree in Fine Art from Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts.
Pratap has participated in several curated group shows, including The Unbearable Closeness of Being at Gallery Engendered, New Delhi (2015); the Art on Paper biennale at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina, USA (2014); Interstices at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012); Stop Making Sense at False Ceiling Gallery, Mumbai (2012); and @rt Virtually Real at Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi (2012) among others. His art fair participation includes United Art Fair, curated by MeeraMenezes, New Delhi (2013), and India Art Fair, New Delhi (2013), represented by Art Alive Gallery.
He has participated in residencies at institutions such as the Harmony Art Foundation, India (2015); the Artists-In-Residence programme hosted by the President of India at the RashtrapatiBhavan, New Delhi (2014); CRACK International Residency, Bangladesh (2013); Space 118, Mumbai (2012); and Uttarayan Art Foundation, Vadodara (2012), and is also the recipient of the Bendre-Husain- Scholarship, India (2013) and the La Critique award at Salon des RéalitésNouvelles, France (2012).
TARQ
F35/36, DhanrajMahal, C.S.M. Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001 +91 22 6615 0424 | info@tarq.in | www.tarq.in
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Image courtesy: Abner Fernandes & TARQ
