511 Gallery
March 2 - April 6, 2024
A Brutal Affair displays new works on paper and large-scale installation centered on Avantika Bawa’s queries into the intersections between drawing and sculpture, minimalist traditions and affects of space, place and site.
This exhibition merges selections of two ongoing bodies of works by the artist: A Brutal Affair and The Scaffold Series. A new series of four silkscreen and lithograph prints, published at the Watershed Center for Print Publishing and Research during Avantika’s 2023 Artist Residency, exemplify the artist’s ongoing explorations on Brutalist architecture. Bawa writes, “The formal and architectural qualities of these buildings, along with their histories, functions, and cultural impacts, fascinate me, and I want to remind the viewer how lines, hard edges, and uncomplicated geometry can be beautiful.”
Overlapping her queries of architecture, impact of scale and abstraction are further explored through Bawa’s installations of The Scaffold Series which began for the artist in 2012. Painted construction scaffolds compel viewer’s bodies through geometrical elegance and command within the gallery space, revealing the temporal beauty of their ubiquitous and utilitarian sculpture material that often birth the “bold and unapologetic” architectures that Bawa is drawn to. “The scaffold is compelling not only as a form, but also as a metaphor. It is strong and solid, yet porous; it is transitional—it is there to help something be created, after which it goes away; it is a bridge from one state to another. It spans, connects, and supports, then vanishes.,” Bawa describes.
Additionally displayed are large-scale relief prints created from print matrices of reduced scaffold forms, present on the paper with a delicate embossment. Together, these bodies of works are both static and moving in conversation through light & shadow, presence & absence, material processing through iteration and a sentiment of subtle anti-monumentality born from a querying impulse to find beauty in what is both natural and built.
Avantika Bawa, The Scaffold Series, 2023, Painted scaffolds and embossings on paper. Dimensions variable. (Installation view of simplenothingsimplesomething, University Galleries of Illinois State University)
Artist Bio:
Avantika Bawa lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Originally from New Delhi, India, she received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India. She has participated in numerous residencies that include the Skowhegan, ME; Ucross Foundation, WY; MacDowell, NH; Kochi Biennial Foundation, India, Nes Artist Residency, Iceland, and recently Iris Projects and Yucca Valley Material Lab, CA. Noteworthy solo exhibits include shows at The Portland Art Museum, OR, Schneider Museum, Ashland, OR, Suyama Space, Seattle, WA, The Columbus Museum, GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Nature Morte and Gallery Maskara in India; White Box, Tilt Gallery & Project Space and Disjecta, Portland, OR. Large scale site-specific installations include, A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, Kutch, India (2019-20), and A Yellow Scaffold on the Ranch, part of Art Beyond, Ashland OR (2021). Bawa is the recipient of several awards, notably the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts 2018 Golden Spot Residency Award, and the Hallie Ford Fellowship presented by the Ford Family Foundation. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain - Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture. www.drainmag.com. In 2014 Avantika was appointed to the board of the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Vancouver, WA.
Avantika Bawa, Pirelli Building, New Haven, CT, USA., 2023, Silkscreen and lithograph on paper, 16.5”x21.5”. Edition of 6. Printed at the Watershed Print Center at PNCA by Matthew Letzelter, marvin parra orozco, Denyse Stawicki, Lauren Voigt, Sam Orosz, Will Mairs, Olive Ritson, Freyja Kohler, Lucas Jose Cantoni, and Maritza Galvan.