"It's about the art that is behind and around the art" Thukral & Tagra

Designer/artist duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including graphics, videos, music, interiors, product design, paintings, sculpture and installations. Their practice fuses the current influx of the Western mainstream with India’s deep-rooted cultural heritage which their portraits and wall drawings combine in a typically quirky, kitsch and eye-catching way.

Thukral & Tagra (T&T) belong to a new generation of young Indian artists reflecting on and working in India, which in the first decade of the 21st century is a place of over-stimulation and decadence, keen to find a synergy between its pasts and futures. The artists break the boundaries between crafts and art, fluttering between contexts and thus following a desire to produce democratic art for the masses.

Based in New Delhi, India, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, graphic and product design, Web sites, music and fashion. The eclectic mix-up of media that T&T work with reflects the hysterical consumerist rage of the country: Graphics, videos, music, interiors, product design, painting, photography. And all of this in a peripatetic Technicolor aesthetic which draws from pop, pop culture, surrealism, photorealism and postmodernism.

In mid-2007 T&T put together a collection of paintings at an exhibition “Adolescere Domus”, or “Teenager House”. It paints the angst and aspirations of Punjabi youth, desperate for a passage to America, dressed in fake designer labels.“The work is based on two years of research that we carried out in Jalandhar where we found a mass exodus,” explains Thukral.

I never wanted to do things that others were doing .I come from a middle class family, very conventional; my mother used to paint and I learned drawing from her. My brother is an architect and my dad is a businessman. I really thank my parents for all their support and am glad to be an artist. My influences include: Pink Floyd, Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, Dehli Metro stations and lot of day to day observations. Jiten Thukral

I belong to a small town: Jalander, Punjab. My dad is a wrestler and a famous artist in Punjab. I am highly influenced by him, but he wanted me to become a Pehalwan (body builder), which I never tried. I started working with him when I was a kid. We did two group shows in 1992. My influences include: toys, Punjabi underground music, Sikh movements, my dad, Stefan Sagmeister, Klan. Sumir Tagra

The Bosedk brand

In reaction to an entrepreneurial brief by Credit Suisse, T&T created a large-format diptych painting focusing on their own tongue-in-cheek entrepreneurial project: The Bosedk brand - “an Anglicised version of a Hindi abuse, Bosedk is a continuation of the trend of consumerism and how products are driving need” says Tagra.

Rows and rows of colourful packaged goods float in a dreamlike scenery, surrounded and encircled by decorative patterns made of miniature plants, vegetables, animals and little people, creating a strange visual puzzle. The highly entertaining painting mixes pop art idioms (the serial products!) with ethnic references and pseudo-traditional ornaments.

The artists have not translated single values, such as Family or Network, but instead depicted their own idea of entrepreneurship: To create a brand and to produce enjoyable work with a democratic outreach. Their artistic strategy in the past has involved the production of stickers and buttons, which they gave away freely, involving everybody in the delightful process of intelligent consumption.

Images and text courtesy of Bose Pacia Gallery (New York, US and Kolkata, India) and Nature Morte (New Delhi, India)

THUKRAL & TAGRA

Jiten Thukral, born 1976 in Jalandhar, India, and Sumir Tagra, born 1978 in New Delhi, India, both live and work in New Delhi.

Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including graphics, videos, music, interiors, product design, paintings, sculpture and installations.

The artists have held solo shows at BosePacia Gallery in New York, Nature Morte in New Delhi and Jehangir Nicholson Gallery in Mumbai. In 2007 they were also present at the Art Statements, Art Basel.

JITEN THUKRAL

Education
BFA, Chandigarh Art College
MFA, New Delhi College of Art

The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

SUMIR TAGRA

Education
BFA, New Delhi College of Art
PG, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
Shankar's Academy of Arts, New Delhi

The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

Exhibitions

2007
"Face East: Contemporary Indian Portraiture", Wedel Fine Art, London
"Adolescere-Domus," installation at Art Statements, Art Basel 38; presented by Nature Morte and Bose Pacia
"Put it On," Bose Pacia, New York (solo)
"Everyday Bosedk," Nature Morte, New Delhi (solo)
"Size Matters," Art Consult, New Delhi
The Armory Show, New York (Nature Morte & Bose Pacia)

2006
FIAC, Paris (Nature Morte & Bose Pacia)
"Vector Classics," Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, NCPA, Mumbai (solo)
"Vector Classics," Alliance Francaise, New Delhi (solo)
Taipei Art Show, Taipei (Nature Morte)
"Global Edit 06," Armani Casa with Wallpaper Magazine, Milan

2005
New Paintings, Nature Morte, New Delhi
"Iconography" Installation Project, Nature Morte, New Delhi

2004
"Visual Dialogue," Hype Gallery, London