Prabhavathi Meppayil

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. DAS is a platform to catalyze a rich context for research and artistic production in the future through empowering artists and the public through the interaction between its exhibition, education and public programs.

Time is rarely subtle. Yet among Prabhavathi Meppayil’s works, one’s gaze is enmeshed in a rare confluence of multiple structures, temporalities and forms that reconfigure our notion of space in and of time. At once archaeological in process and expansive in reading, Meppayil’s multimedia paintings confound for their immediacy and immeasurability.

These newly commissioned works observe how Muzharul Islam’s reliance on both social and empirical structures informed the making and occupation of space. For Meppayil, her work shares in a similar layering of ideas; of an intuitive composition of sublime architectures that may be affected by forces such as entropy while at the same time, resistant to present day desires for immediacy and easy reproduction. In this oscillation between additive and subtractive connotations, of surfaces marked and degraded, Meppayil’s works encourage the generative act of looking closely and seeing beyond.

Prabhavathi Meppayil’s practice rests in her meticulous approach to conceiving and executing processes specific to the materials that she uses. Coming from a family of goldsmiths, Meppayil adopts artisan techniques as a means to relocate particular materials as a generator of forms, providing a parallel reading to the way in which western art histories were received in the twentieth century. Through the use of nontraditional tools and often copper wire, she carves, erases and highlights carefully conceived lines and patterns into layers of gesso to underscore the blurring of painting, drawing, and other disciplines while establishing meditative installations.

For more information, please visit DAS's (opens in a new window) website.