Prajakta Potnis

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Born 1980, Prajakta Potnis received her graduate and postgraduate degree from Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai and is a recipient of several awards and scholarships. Her group participations include in 2009: Indian Highway, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway. In 2008, Potnis had two major solo shows including “membranes and margins” in Seoul, Korea and then ‘Porous Walls’ at The Guild, Mumbai. She is a growing name in the Indian and International art scene.

“My works often evolve from personal experiences, they are notations of the fragility and disregard experienced in the everyday living; like the unnoticed leftover food lying in the refrigerator for several days, the essence within my work develops from something as inconsequential as that and can expand into an area, like the fungus growing on the walls of a house/city to an unprecedented growth within ones body. The images provoke a sense of intrusion within a private space, which reflects a feeling of isolation. My paintings have always been devoid of the human figure with references to the presence of human existence; these empty unoccupied spaces evoke a sense of decay and discard. With undertones of personal mythologies, the images echo a certain kind of numbness. The area of my work breeds between the intimate world of an individual and the world outside, which is separated only by a wall.

I am moved by the walls that are found in middle class homes, it’s interesting to observe their inviting colors, and I am intrigued by the character of these alluring peeled walls. Painting these painted surfaces, which also have traces of history and inhabitance embedded in it, I want my paintings to be a part of these walls. My concern resides within the four walls of a household where life grows / decays, these concerns are tackled similar to “a still life” within an interior space wherein the “still” wall transforms as a veil and also as organic separations between the inside and the outside world, e.g. the porous walls, the “wall” also addresses to the margins that develop within communities in a city to the bodily margins like a skin or a membrane. I dwell on the fragility and irony experienced in everyday living to draw an intimate viewpoint to echo the complex psychological character/attitude of people living within the four walls of a house or a city” - Prajakta Potnis.

“All the world’s a skin, for Prajakta Potnis Ponmany. A skin that could be the body’s wall against the world, threatened by sudden inflammation; or the epidermis of a room, flaking by degrees and punctured to let hidden electricity spark through. And then there is the skin of delicate conception that turns into the carapace of an apparatus and is subverted by the imperceptible challenges of pearl-like fungus and fizzy bacteria: witness the hard edges of man-made tools and objects that get mossed over by irrepressible, uncontrollable growths in Potnis’ accounts of a process of decay that is also a strange new beginning. Potnis’ recent works – an ensemble of paintings, sculpture-installation and photographs – variously suggest the theatre, the kitchen and the laboratory. Her pale acrylic paintings, marked with dry pastel, are domestic interiors in which the walls are drafted like backcloths. She focuses, not on the objects and appointments of the room, but on the demarcation that constitutes the interior into an interior, and chooses to render this as an unstable boundary condition rather than as a fixture. Potnis elaborates for us architecture of indeterminacy in which walls, windows and valances are the conspiratorial protagonists. Thus, in Potnis’ paintings and site-specific installations, the domestic interior edges towards the off-stage drama, through porous walls that provide endless potential for voyeurism, gossip and insight.” Nancy Adjania