Artist Biography
Nataraj Sharma (b. 1958, Mysuru, India, based in Baroda, India and Goa, India) explores the aspirations and realities that lie within historical progress and urbanisation. Working across painting, installation and digital art, his visual language shifts between figuration abstraction to evoke a sense of urban frenzy and disenchantment.
Combining the Modernist, geometric tendencies of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group and the appropriative approaches of Pop Art and Dadaism, Sharma has created bold expressions of urbanscapes since the 1990s. His painting, Untitled (Playground) (2002), depicts human figures balancing precariously atop rigid structures and construction scaffolding, suggesting the complex dynamics between humans and machines within the wider forces of modernisation. In his monumental installation Constructs (2008–2015), high-rise apartment buildings reach towards the ceiling, frozen in an unfinished, mid-construction state. Rusty and void of life, the miniaturised estate points to the perpetual cycle of urban decay and regeneration.
Sharma obtained his BFA in Applied Art from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1982. His work is held in numerous collections including the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art New Delhi.
Notable exhibitions include Frame Figure Field (2008), Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi; Edge of Desire (2007), National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai; Edge of Desire (2006), Berkeley Art Museum; Edge of Desire (2006), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Hungry God (2006), Museum of Modern Art, Busan; Edge of Desire (2005), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Edge of Desire (2005), Queens Museum of Art, New York; Edge of Desire (2005), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; The Artist Lives and Works (2005), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and iCon (2005), (Collateral Event of the 51st Venice Biennale), Campo San Cosmo, Venice.
Sharma had his residency at the STPI Workshop in 2006, resulting in the exhibition Stretch (2007).