Cloth Pasted on Fibreglass
37 × 58 × 13 inches
2006
Jagannath Panda is a sculptor by training who moves between painting, sculpture, and installation, composing spare, deceptively calm images of an India transforming at speed—works in which precise drawing, isolated rendered forms, and applied materials such as silver foil, thread, and tracing sheet hold the tension between nature and headlong development.
Born in 1970 in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, Panda took his BFA in Sculpture at the B.K. College of Arts and Crafts there in 1991, followed by an MFA in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, in 1994. After a year as visiting research fellow at the Fukuoka University of Education in Japan in 1997, he earned a further master’s degree in fine sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2002—a formation pursued, at every stage, through the discipline of sculpture, even as his mixed-media canvases have carried his reputation internationally.
His subjects come from lived geography: the Odisha of his early years and the crowded Delhi conurbation where he now lives and works. Himself a migrant to the capital, Panda takes up rural exodus, express urbanisation, and the dislocation they leave behind—conflicts he understands as a continuing tussle between environment and development, nature and technology—and he prefers level-headed observation to romance or fantasy. His surfaces can seem light, almost weightless, yet they sketch a near future already visibly under construction.
Panda’s solo exhibitions include Nothing Is Solid at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai (2007), The Action of Nowhere at Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Alexia Goethe Gallery, London (2009), Metropolis of Mirage at Nature Morte, New Delhi and Berlin (2011), and The Trance Narratives at Halcyon Gallery, London (2015), with earlier outings at the Za Moca Foundation Gallery, Tokyo (1998) and Berkeley Square Gallery, London (2006). His work has travelled through major surveys of contemporary Indian art—Chalo! India at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2008), Indian Highway at MAXXI, Rome, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011–12), and Phantoms of Asia at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2012)—and is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 1990 and the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society Award, New Delhi, in 1996, and has completed residencies with Khoj in Delhi and at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.