Anarchitecture

It is from this building, and specifically from its iconic window shutters, that Shezad Dawood takes his inspiration for the new paintings presented in Anarchitecture. Playing with the concepts of light and shade, positive and negative, the artist examines the relationship between Raymond’s incorporation of Japanese and Indian ideals into his work as an architect, as well as the discourse around negation in the Kyoto school of philosophy and its reconfiguring of a more positivist Kantian formulation. Dawood’s works also manifest the artist’s deep interest in a variety of philosophers, expressing the tension of basic formulations such as “both/and” and “either/or” posed by Schopenhauer and Heidegger, whose roots can be found in the Indian logician Nagarjuna of the 2nd and 3rd century. Stripped back, but by no means austere, this series of paintings celebrates colour as a vital principle in Dawood’s aesthetics of negation.

Alongside the new textile paintings, carefully considering and utilizing the gallery itself as an architectural construct, Dawood is also presenting two wall-mounted neon sculptures that form part of his on-going, related research into Modernist Architecture, Indian spirituality and tantric forms: Pondicherry Mon Amour (after Antonin Raymond) and I.A.M, both from 2011.