Mannat Gandotra | All over feeling

16 February - 16 March 2024

Indigo+Madder is pleased to present All over feeling, London-based Mannat Gandotra’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

The new body of paintings are inspired by everyday sensory information and musical traditions - especially the improvisation and physicality of Jazz and the expressive, aural to visual language of Ragamala paintings. The latter, a genre of fifteenth century Indian court painting, visualised various emotions through depictions of lovers’ encounters, often taking place against a background of changing seasons. While Gandotra is interested in the visualisation of moods, she utilises the language of abstraction to express emotionality through line, gesture and colour.

Gandotra’s process involves repetition of strokes and spontaneous, extensive mark-making to extract forms which she observes in the colours, washes and negative spaces created on the surface. Improvisation, a device used in musical traditions such as jazz, influences the paint application. The ‘in the moment’ compositional decisions in play, convey raw emotionality. In Patch things up, Gandotra is interested in how colours emit light, and forms appear like gently gliding ships or swooshing, sinking kites. She mines childhood memories of encountering kite flying in Japanese anime and in India, where it is a popular springtime activity that animates the sky, with colour and motion. The sky slashed with high velocity shapes and reverberations of rushing, swishing sounds.

Suspended forms in works such as Igniting the habit capture fleeting motions, through the movement of the brush or thick parabolic shapes created though a build-up of colour. Fractured lines, with anatomical nerve like severed endings, interlace to give the effect of disordered weaving. Fluid washes in the foreground lend depth, giving the surface a complex layered look. Some paintings Unsolved Rubik’s cube and Eye animals take on the density of wild forest-like scenes where foliage-like patterns collide, and form seems to be breaking apart - compositions are reordered and harmony is disrupted.

The works explore the intersections of abstraction, music and nature to create charged surfaces that defy synchronisation. Atonal, syncopated, dissonant – in Gandotra’s paintings, colliding visual languages, senses and sounds are all meshed into paint.

Mannat Gandotra (b. 2001, India) lives and works in London. She holds a BFA from the Slade school of Fine Art (2023) and will receive her MFA from Royal College of Art in 2024. Recent exhibitions include Nouvelle Vague, LBF Contemporary, 2024 and a solo in Italy at Luce Gallery: All of Civilisation on a Leaf, 2023.

SELECTED WORKS