For Hong Kong Art Fair 2009, Galleria dell’Arco hosts a special project of Indian artist Om Soorya.

Galleria dell’arco presently hosts 4 shows every year in its gallery premises in Shanghai and 4 at its Italian venue. It also runs a residency program ‘Revolving boundaries’ who later produce site-specific works of art.

The new Om Soorya project comprises a group of watercolors that investigate the ‘perception of Asian urban landscape’, with a focus on cities like Mumbai, Hong Kong and Shanghai, which is filtered through the artist’s imaginative sensibility, to convey a unique mix of Indian contemporary painting and tradition. Exploring the socio-cultural role every city discloses, Om Soorya’s works are suspended between realism and fiction, description and poetry, history and utopia. Here is what the artist states about his work:

“Sans any reason or purpose I started to draw the hills, trees, houses, moon and gods with black charcoal on the white wall. Being a child I was not aware of the possibility of becoming an artist.

“I wish to bring into play an experience of painting rather than merely creating imageries. It’s the combination of subjective & objective surroundings, collating imagery from unexpected or contradictory sources – geographical, contemporary and historical. I enjoy through this process the relationship between figurative and abstract art.

“The broad idea of my painting is not really far away from the conventional wisdom or thoughts; it is quite close to life and its existence. My visual language has evolved through my experience in rural and urban spaces. It creates a kind of ambiguity between chaos of culture, reality and unreality, and results in a spiritual quest.”

“My recent work deals with the issue of urbanization, which is unavoidable. But how can we take care of our fast depleting ecological system? This is what really matters. The geographical space in my creations is influenced by the immediate surroundings of Hyderabad, where I live and work.”

Villages have turned just a bizarre contradiction of distorted urbanization. The migrants are forced to be part of cultural chaos, and get sucked into the entrails of the giant, ruthless economic machines. Though I draw attention to this issue, I do not make any statement through my work. I simply try to explore the possibility of painting in terms of both visual sensibility and content.”