A Commentary on the Times

Anita Dube paints a picture of the unsettling realities of our times, and the perpetual human desire for the sublime

- Trisha Mukherjee

Metaphysician, historian and philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy's aesthetic theory advocated the role of art as a contemplative tool to understand the divine. The theory finds an unintended yet nearly accurate visual representation in Anita Dube's ongoing exhibition, with a bilingual title, Three Storey House or Timanjila Ghar. Except that Dube, self-admittedly, is not interested in the religious but the sacred. "As a secular person, I am interested in finding out if I can make an icon, something that has the same qualities as a religious thing; it takes you to another place. Why do people need religion? To get out of the mundane, and reach another level... spiritually. So I wanted to make something that is spiritual but not religious," she says.

Experiencing Three Storey House, exhibited across the three floors of Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery, is indeed akin to embarking on a journey towards a pure form of expression. While the ground floor represents the grimy realities of human existence, the first floor is dedicated to the great thinkers, poets and leaders, whose words packed life lessons. The viewer is then led into a completely abstract field of colours on the top-most level, prompting introspection and inducing a state of equanimity. Coomaraswamy, in 1928, termed the culmination of such an ascend salvation; Dube calls it "a meditative sublime celebration of love in all its wondrous hues".