Anatomy of a Crisis

As people cope with a raging pandemic, N. S. Harsha maps changing collective behaviour and altering community life with empathy and irony, finds Kamayani Sharma.

- Kamayani Sharma

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many artists addressed the upheaval of the past two years through both allusion and direct representation. On view from the 2nd of March to the 2nd of May at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, N.S. Harsha's solo Stomach Studio responded to COVID-19 through a series of large acrylic paintings that take a somewhat frontal approach to the crisis.

The pandemic is most obviously addressed in paintings featuring hands, highly regulated transmitters of the virus. In May 2020 (2020) the blue-gloved hand seems to breach an indigo layer, haloed by an effervescent white curve, as though it were immersed in water. Void Gate (2021) depicts another gloved hand holding a rotten apple, part of its exterior hollowed out as a jagged black hole. Straightforward representations of caution and decay during a time of death, these works combine the illusionism of creased latex with abstract shapes signalling the artifice of the image; the danger is real, and the way out will depend on our imagination.