Aman Aheer | body double

1 December - 14 january 2023

indigo+madder is thrilled to present body double, an exhibition of new paintings by Aman Aheer. Aheer’s work explores connections between illusion, mimicry and everyday violence, to reconsider notions of reality and intimacy. Using a repertoire of symbolism and iconography, the works convey tension, movement and provocation, with great economy, through simplified form, colour and texture.

Throughout the exhibition, Aheer makes use of architectural and bodily vocabularies, using patterns from stone facades, scaled up eye-like forms, prostrating figures, and limbs drawn into hesitant gestures of embrace. Suture II features lozenge-shaped geometric patterns, commonly found in various architectural elements. They are painted to mimic the grain and texture of marble, with veins swirling, rippling and cracking. A length of red cord hangs from either ends of the canvas. While striving for exactitude in the illusion, Aheer also disrupts it by incorporating three-dimensional surface interventions. The cord weaving through the work, seems to be forcefully joining the plane together - alluding to the tension between an original and its copy. The use of mimesis and thread work also relates to his childhood experience of diasporic South Asian caste-based societal structures, acculturation in communities and memory. Growing up he remembers 'feeling a tension between owning our identity as Dalit (1) and wanting to conceal it. There was always an uneasy relationship between shame and pride, between a proximity to, yet distance from, others. These seemingly incompatible feelings somehow existed together. In my work, I try to extract that tension and convert it into the visual realm. I explore it through forms like wrestling bodies or strained eyes, in opposing mediums like oil and watercolour, and by contrasting architectural motifs with stitch'.

Extimacy I and II feature prostrating figures that mirror each other. They play with the Lacanian concept of extimacy, which collapses distinctions between the exterior world and the most intimate psychological interior world. The paintings explore parameters of subject, body, interpersonal relationships and intimacy. The figures, facing opposite directions, and engaged in a gesture of submission, are drawn from visual languages across religions and produce disquiet and tension. Dissolve, similarly refers to the tension between the interior and exterior, by focusing on the eye motif. It suggests visuality, while also alluding to religious symbology, surveillance, and protective energy. By bringing together multiple facets of culture, inner personality, personal conflict and lived experience, the exhibition investigates what lies beyond the surface, to present a complex picture of reality and illusion.

(1) For centuries, the Dalit community in South Asia have faced discrimination, marginalisation, stigma and violence.

Aman Aheer (b. 1992, Vancouver, Canada) lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2018 and has exhibited in both Canada and the United Kingdom. Recent solo exhibitions include Man is Not a Bird, St. Peter’s Church, Cambridge, 2022. Group exhibitions include Hope, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, 2022; The Glass Bead Game, MAMOTH, London, 2021; and Moving Throughlines, Seymour Gallery, Vancouver, 2020. Aheer’s public commissions include Preserving Light at the Aga Khan Centre, London, and a selection of works for the No. 3 Road Art Columns in Richmond.

SELECTED WORKS