Nityan Unnikrishnan | Every Day is an Admission of Guilt | MGW 2023

Chatterjee & Lal is excited to be part of the 11th edition of MGW and looks forward to hosting Nityan Unnikrishnan’s solo show at the gallery!

In Nityan Unnikrishnan’s Every Day is an Admission of Guilt, both the painted and sculpted works raise questions about space, formalism, and content; there is a residual tension between the way Unnikrishnan represents controlled indoor spaces and the unconfined outdoors. Indoors, the colours are more homogeneous, the shapes more regular, and the lines well-defined. Indoor spaces seem intentional and organized; like the painting’s frame itself, contained and containing. Not so outside, where the lines are hardly ever straight, and a diverse palette often bursts formality and realism. From these latter amorphous and fluctuating spaces emerge the artist’s sculptures too, titled Avarna Sutra (Edicts of the Casteless) neither limited by shape, nor by perspective. Every Day is an Admission of Guilt is Nityan Unnikrishnan’s seventh exhibition at Chatterjee & Lal, and, for many of us, sculpture is new territory. This exhibition feels familiar, therefore, and also challenging as it grapples with the artist’s own changing media and sensibility. Through sculpture, Unnikrishnan teases us, inviting us to speculate about his body of work retrospectively. How does a new medium—ceramics, in this case—trace an artist’s intellectual journey? All histories are presentist, as a historian would glibly admit: does an individual artist’s latest work similarly rewrite his own artistic past?

~ Kedar A. Kulkarni

Excerpt of exhibition text by Kedar A. Kulkarni.