Indian Art's Master of Reinvention

Thirty years after he first burst onto the scene, Jitish Kallat delivers yet another spectacle.

- GIRISH SHAHANE

IN ONE SENSE, it would be accurate to call Jitish Kallat’s rise meteoric: No Indian artist has achieved as much critical and commercial success at as young an age as he did. On the other hand, the artist, whose recent work is preoccupied with the solar system and cosmos, would likely regard the adjective as misplaced, since meteors are pieces of rock falling into Earth’s atmosphere and burning up in the process. Let us settle for skyrocketing rather than meteoric.

Kallat was a precocious 20-year-old studying at Mumbai's Sir JJ School of Art when he showed at the Nehru Centre. On graduating in 1996, he exhibited in the JJ School’s annual monsoon show at the Jehangir Art Gallery (JAG) along with a cohort of talented batchmates that included Reena Saini—his girlfriend at the time, now his wife of two and a half decades, and a prolific artist herself. It was here that he encountered Shireen Gandhy, the director of Gallery Chemould (now called Chemould Prescott Road), which occupied a space on the floor above JAG. Getting into the spirit of the paintings, Gandhy removed her watch and held it between her teeth as she introduced herself, imitating a self-portrait in which a watchstrap dangled from the central figure’s mouth. It was, in Kallat’s words, “The most charming way to meet your first gallerist.”