Thukral & Tagra
Dominus Aeris – Panis Quotidie_1,
2016
Oil on Canvas
72 × 72 in
Jiten Thukral Born 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab, India _1998 BFA, Chandigarh Art College _2000 MFA, New Delhi College of Art
Sumir Tagra Born 1979, New Delhi, India _1999 Shankar’s Academy of Arts, New Delhi _2002 BFA, New Delhi College of Art _2006 PG, National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work together with a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installations, interactive games, video, performance and design. Thukral & Tagra work on new formats of public engagement and attempt to expand the scope of what art can do. They break out of the mediated and disciplinary world and create multi-modal sensory and immersive environments.
Working collaboratively to produce exuberant and darkly humorous works in a dizzying range of media, including painting, installation, and video, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, known as Thukral & Tagra, simultaneously send up, criticize, and participate in the globalized, rampant consumer culture in India. Like their older contemporary Takashi Murakami, Thukral & Tagra blur the lines between high and low, commercial and artistic, product placement and exhibition design, and artistic inspiration and media hype. Their practice encompasses museums and galleries as well as graphic and product design. In works like Wonder Woman II (2011), for example, Thukral & Tagra mix iconic Indian motifs—lotus flowers—with iconic images from Western pop culture—of Superman—to explore the juxtapositions of East and West, traditional and new, enduring and ephemeral in Indian culture and identity in the 21st century.
Courtesy of thukralandtagra.com, artsy.net
Courtesy of saffronart.com, artsy.net