Trishla Jain’s ‘Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies’ exhibit opens Feb 10

New Delhi - Trishla Jain, a budding entrepreneur and artist, will be hosting her second solo exhibition ‘Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies’ at Gallery BMB in Mumbai from February 10 to March 6. 

The multiple stimuli at work in this show point towards a refusal by this generation to be defined by any one culture or heritage. If sufi poetry inspires, so does a Shakespeare sonnet and Bollywood kitsch can be her material as much as vintage British postcards.

Found phrases form an integral part of this new graffiti-style aesthetic. Trishla finds these phrases in newspapers or in books while leafing through her library. It is the phrase that first makes it to the blank canvas and then it just “organically grows from there”.

Her fascination for ‘found items’, which she comes across in flea markets and curio shops she visits during her travels abroad, has also inspired her works.

A yellowed greeting card with a romantic message, an advertisement for Zaalim lotion and even a school chart showing varieties of flowers have worked their way into her installations and paintings. It is as if she were taking the detritus of a throwaway society, detaching it from its original function, and remaking it in her own visual language.

A graduate in English from Stanford University, Trishla first picked up the brush when she was just seven.

Her first solo show, ‘That Freshness’ which was held in Delhi in October 2010 saw an amalgamation of her artist’s love of colour and a poet’s love of words as she teamed each canvas by a few lines she had penned.

As the 26-year-old’s oeuvre has matured with time, her art foraged even further beyond the physical beauty of nature to metaphysical spheres.

But the witty whimsy and colourful felicity that have always characterized her style still bubble up incorrigibly.

Yet there is sense in her randomness, a fuzzy logic to her spontaneity, and a glorious technicolour in her expression that she has aptly encapsulated by picking that evocative line from the Beatles’ psychedelic 1967 song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as the title for her show.

Her lack of formal training in art coupled with an aesthetic sense honed by seeing the works of great masters the world over, has kept her compositions unrestrained.

Robustly indefinable, her style using a plethora of materials from paints to wallpaper to curios and discards is an honest reflection of Trishla’s own inquiring, eclectic mind and evolving experiences, where the only constant is change.