
Mahesh Baliga at David Zwirner
Apr 12, 2022 — May 28, 2022
For those who love people watching
If you are a committed people-watcher, eagerly awaiting spring so you can plop yourself on a park bench or cafe terrace and look at the passing crowd, you share a special kinship with the Indian artist Mahesh Baliga. In Drawn to Remember, Baliga presents both “lap-sized paintings” and larger works, all devoted to looking, with constant curiosity, at ordinary people and moments from western India. The everyday occupations of Baliga’s subjects — a man clips his toenails, a group of figures sit in a hospital waiting room — belie their subdued but smouldering power. A man’s shirt pocket leaks a stain from a burst pen, a mother elephant and her calf hasten to take shelter from a sudden rain. More than anything, Baliga proves himself an artist of extraordinary generosity: having captured his own observations and memories so artfully, he shares them openly and exquisitely with us.