Collage Art Prints
Art365 | New Delhi, India
Collaged pictures were often displayed in the palatial homes of Vaishnava Aggarwal merchants of the Shekhavati region in Rajasthan and the nearby town of Bhiwani in Haryana. In these collages, imported prints of European landscapes or scenery painted by artists from Nathdwara in Rajasthan, which often mimicked the colonial mansions of their patrons, were used as a background over which figures cut out from popular prints depicting religious or nationalist subjects were superimposed, to serve cultural and national objectives.
A group of collages related to the freedom struggle, the nationalist movement and the communal identity. These collages served as vehicles for the appropriation of the nationalist movement to the Vaishnava fold. Two intermingling streams of imagery of Indianness / Hinduness flowed simultaneously - one exemplified by mass-produced and national circulated images, such as Ravi Varma’s Hindu mythological pictures and the other by regional / communal imagery such as the collages of Shekhavati.
Another group of collages related to the Krishnaleela, showing the erotic nand promiscuous play of Krishna, often staged against the backdrop of colonial estates of wealthy merchant families. The technique of collage upturned the circulation of female figures around Krishna by invoking them in German or Swiss landscapes, or in the idealised spaces of colonial merchant homes. This relocation of the sacred to mercantile mansions served to sanctify them as spaces of divine power.
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