Statuesque in Maximum City

Right in the centre of Art Mumbai, an art fair spread across two lakh sqft, at The Mahalakshmi Race Course, stands Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture. It is one of the most iconic images in American history of the 20th century. It was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as a Christmas card in 1965. Since then, the LOVE motif, a poetic inquiry about love itself, has stood tall around the world.

From November 14 to 17, it graced Art Mumbai’s Sculpture Walk, supported by RMZ Foundation. “The fair is an assemblage of 20 installations stationed across the venue, to pay homage to the metropolis and explore interactions between nature and the city; how nature co-exists amid constant urbanisation in Mumbai,” says Veerangana Solanki, curator of the project.

Exploring the city’s relation with its sea, especially its traditional fisher folks—the Kolis—is artist Parag Tandel’s Vitamin Sea and Coastal Road Project 3, a sculpture of a translucent, amber resin showing a plankton-like organism. “Eating juvenile fish and eggs of a fish was considered a sin in our community. But post colonisation, this biophilic practice changed, and the marine life started dwindling. As a visual auto-ethnographer, I wanted to showcase the impact of colonisation, invasion, and urbanisation on the sea of Mumbai, especially now in the realm of constant reclamation of the sea, the latest being the coastal road project,” says Tandel.

Another work that stands out is Yashika Sugandh’s Matar. The work that looks like a pea pod was born from a spontaneous moment, an unexpected discovery of a caterpillar nestled inside a pod. This sparked Sugandh’s reflection on the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the fragile balance within them.

In the work, the artist explores the concept of home for creatures of all sizes, interpreting it as a sanctuary and a symbol of coexistence. For her, home is a fluid concept: it’s not confined by walls or boundaries but is a space where life unfolds, is shared, and sometimes lost.

Artist Monali Meher, an artist based in Gent, Belgium, creates a site-specific work Terra Incognita meaning unknown territory or subject, a continuation of her artistic practice since 2019 at Art Mumbai. When Meher created her research-driven installation in 2019, she sought to express this concept through a fusion of natural elements such as soil, sand, salt, oil, water, bark, coal, hay, shells, twigs, turmeric, and pigments.

The installation, with its surreal composition of solid, fluid, and fragile structures fashioned from melted and recycled glass, became a multi-layered, enigmatic landscape, evolving as visitors engaged with its changing forms. With Terra Incognita, Meher crafts a similar work with locally sourced materials reconnecting with her birthplace.

“I look at the city with its eternal familiarity and elusive ambiguity as grounding,” she says. Its history, layered with colonial legacies and current socio-political dynamics, permeates into her work, blending with the site’s specificity to create a new narrative and hybrid identity.

Questioning the idea of home is also Baroda-based sculptor Shaik Azghar Ali in his work Rain. The blue, metal work that appears as massive drops of water is a response to an increasing pattern of migration across the country and what it means to uproot oneself.

The highlight of the Sculpture Walk though is Ravinder Reddy’s big, golden face of a woman titled Devi. No matter how many times you see the artist’s heads, it invokes a sense of awe. His work is a celebration of the female form, encapsulated by his eye for detail as well as his respect for the feminine—whether depicted as giant heads or figurative, voluptuous sculptures.

His palette features gold, red, yellow and blue. The gaze of Reddy’s women is always arresting, looking straight, bold, uninhibited. His works are inspired from the Gupta, Maurya, Amravathi and Chola dynasties, West African murals and the Yakshi-like forms of the Kushan and Mathura styles. Reddy states that he always wanted the eyes to make the viewer feel a little dwarfed.

It is only apt then that it stands as the centrepiece of Art Mumbai’s Sculpture Walk, which aimed at orienting the visitors into the world of art and get them thinking about the city, its nature, its life, its people and its vibe.