Kajal Shah

“I am trying to search for the threads from the past that weave through my present in my attempt to connect them with the ongoing dilemmas for identity, contradictions and judgments. It creates an illusion between dream and realities.” Kajal Shah.

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About the Artist:
Kajal Shah was born in Gujarat, India in December 1977. She received her Diploma in Painting in 1998 from the C.N College of Fine Arts in Ahmedabad. In 2000, Shah received her Degree in Graphics from M.S. University at Baroda.
Few of her select solo exhibitions include “Birds Nest,”’09, a site-specific installation in Baroda, India and “Solo” ‘06, in Ahmedabad, India. Shah’s work has also been featured in a number of group exhibitions such as “Across the Threshold,” ’08, Bangalore; “Hide and Seek” ’08, Kochi; “Imagine Reality” ’08, Baroda; “Obscure Objects of Desire”, ’07, Kochi; “Unfolding Grace,” ’06; (an exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture in Baroda); “Footprints,” an exhibition featuring the work of thirty women printmakers which traveled to Banglore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad; "Sense & Blend" ,’05,Baroda and “Pratyaksha Paroksha,” ’04, Mumbai. One of her earliest shows was the exhibition “Images on Images” in '01 at the Kanoria Center for the Arts in Ahmedabad.
Shah has been showcased in two group exhibitions at the Tamarind Art Gallery in New York City, USA, including “Silt of Sentiment” in May ‘09 and “Dynamic Perception” in February ‘08.
Shah has been the recipient of a number of awards including the the 44th Rajya Lalit Kala Exhibition Award in Painting in ‘04 in Ahmedabad. In 2000 she was awarded the 40th Rajya Lalit Kala Exhibition award in Graphics. Shah has also received the Artist Scholarship in Painting from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism from ‘03 to ‘05. From ‘01 to ‘03, she was Artist in Residence for the program in printmaking at the Kanoria Center for the Arts in Ahmedabad, which included a three-month fellowship and use of a studio for two years.

About the Work:
Shah evocatively employs the motif of the ‘house’ to symbolize a home. Shah’s work continues to address her prior existing interest in depicting contemporary urban landscapes and aberrant domestic structures. She documents the world around her, imagined and factual, with a sort of magical realism. Shah’s works reveal both the magic and transitory nature of all objects—objects that have almost become invisible because of their very familiarity. Shah’s works verge ever so slightly on the surreal; in fact, her strongest works are those that flirt with altered instances and prompt an emotional or psychological response.
She engages with the motif of the house as the paragon of belonging and familiarity, as portrayed in the painting where the ‘home’ is curiously perched upon the tip of the dog’s tail and possessively clutched in her jaws. She invests her paintings with dreamful desires as observed in all of her works that include the recurring theme of the home. Sometimes the home metamorphoses into a playful paradigmatic animation as a chef’s hat or emanates from the formation of overgrown moss. Sometimes the image is suspended from dark rain-laden cloud or dangles as fruit or trophies from a leafless, barren tree. In other paintings the home becomes a suitcase for an immigrant or small figures of a house revolve like satellites around a spinning top. Her painterly configuration conjures limitless space emphatically embedding her pictorial elements amidst the starkness of vacuum, void and infinity. Her visual designs constitute her comprehension of the world through events occurring in her surroundings.
For images of these works from the “Silt and Sentiment” exhibition, click here to see the online catalogue and for images of her paintings included in the “Dynamic Perceptions” exhibition click here.

Shah tirelessly engages herself on a quest for new forms of expression, explorations in various mediums and materials, while probing the idea of hidden identity and hidden reality. Her meticulously detailed canvases and her explorations of space – both physical and psychological – produce razor-sharp insights.