Dave’s work is clearly influenced by the western legacies of pop art and collage. However, the density of elements and layered images derive equally from Indian streets, billboards, and objects of daily life, splashed with colour and iconography.
Part painting, part photography and largely dark toned, his work looks at first like an interestingly abstract pastiche; its figures, at times taken from the news media, provide an allegorical puzzle.
As stated by art critic Kamala Kapoor, “The effect is a chilling glimpse of our agitated age, the inexorable passage of time and of the crumbling of cultural, moral, social, and aesthetic structures that were once taken for granted...” (Bose Pacia Gallery, New York)
Everything about his work - its source of origination, it’s subject, it’s audience - relates to the people of the world. “Their directly shared connection gives my work a strong communicative quality and the potential to become large scale murals in metropolises where all kinds of people from all over the world try to find their own identity”. It is this communicative quality in his art that deems it worthy of the oft-attempted description ‘international’.
Vinod Dave was born in Chital Village, Gujarat, India and now lives in New York, USA. He gained MA in mixed media (painting and photography) with Highest Honours from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, India and the University of South Carolina, USA. His exhibitions include six solo shows in Bombay and New Delhi and he has been represented in museums and art centres in USA, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and China. Besides teaching art and art history at universities in India and USA, Vinod Dave has received fellowships and awards in recognition of outstanding work in painting, drawing and photography from institutions such as the Asian Cultural Council in New York, the Indian National Academy of Art and the Cultural Fellowship of the government of India.
Vinod Dave has been recognised as one of the leading photographers working with mixed media and his works can be found in the collections of the Indian National Academy of Art, Gujarat State Academy of Art, Punjab University Museum, Max Mueller Center and many private collections.
Vinod Dave has mastered the techniques of mixed media, combining elements of collage, photography and painting to evoke unique surface textures and luminescence. These formidable skills have never been more beautifully depicted than in the series of new canvases now on view. These paintings are an eloquent expression of Dave’s multiculturalism. They begin in the rural farming villages of Gujarat where the artist photographs posed local villagers dressed in the Navrati theatrical costumes of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These photographic elements are transferred onto canvas in the bathtub darkroom of his West Village studio. In other paintings, he begins with photographs taken in Manhattan where multi-ethnic New Yorkers wearing Levi’s and Nikes are posed as Hindu saints and deities. These canvases then serve as the backdrop for the final painting and photo-manipulation resulting in exquisite, subtle images that draw the viewer into a twilight world between East and West where all things seem disconcertingly familiar, yet reassuringly foreign.
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