With their latest group of works, Thukral & Tagra explore the bizarre mix of sentimentality, nostalgia and clichéd futurisms that is epitomized by the rising Indian middle class and especially in the burgeoning new city of Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi where the artists live and work. Gurgaon, a rising hub of manufacturing and information technology, is also a sprawling residential community characterized by faux-classical mansions, towering apartment blocks decked out like colonial bungalows, mega-malls dominated by globalized food courts, and steel and glass behemoths connected by dirt roads. Thukral & Tagra’s frenetic mixture of high and low styles in paintings, sculptures and decorative accoutrements is an apt response to this bewildering and perverse urban reality typifying the “new India.”
(more, Nature Morte Berlin)
