South Asian artist Sarindar Dhaliwal’s solo exhibition ‘When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours’ opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) on July 22.
Featuring artworks from the past forty years, including photographs, immersive installations, watercolour paintings, drawings and textile works, Dhaliwal’s personal expressions are rooted in her childhood memories and experiences of migration, from India to England and Canada.
In this, her first AGO solo exhibition, the artist’s significant contribution to Canadian art will be illustrated by a selection of key works, including meticulously rendered drawings and mixed media works from the 1980s to the 2000s, alongside large-scale installations and recent photography.
Born in Punjab, India in 1953, Dhaliwal spent her formative years in Southall, England, before migrating to Canada as a teenager. While attending art school in Cornwall, England in the late 70s, her main goal was to learn how to paint. Her professors scoffed at the bright hues she loved, encouraging her to adopt the minimalist style of the time. This only propelled her to embrace colour more. The collage-like composition that recurs throughout her practice likewise stems from an art education that ignored teaching her perspective painting.
Addressing both difficult personal and colonial histories, Dhaliwal relies on rich colour, materials and lush florals to create artworks that cast a critical eye while leaving room for wonder and imagination. “I do not,” she says, “want to sacrifice politics for beauty but to engage one through the other.” The autobiographical tendancy in her work, the poignant childhood memories and stories of a life lived between cultures, she says “is another way of saying I am a person – I did and do exist…it is the thread that ties my work together.”
Reckoning with the horrific aftermath of the 1947 partitioning of India, Dhaliwal has imagined, in a series of eleven works, the fate of the British barrister who drew the borders, one Cyril Radcliffe. Two of these works are included in the exhibition: In the cartographer’s mistake: The Radcliffe Line (2012), Dhaliwal presents a map of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh made of different-hued marigolds. In the cartographers mistake: Medicine Hat’s Reprieve (2020) Dhaliwal inscribes a wall with hand-made clay letters, recounting an imagined journey by the titular cartographer – now transformed into a parrot – to Medicine Hat in 1910 alongside English novelist Rudyard Kipling.
Admission is free for all Indigenous peoples, AGO Members, Annual Passholders and visitors aged 25 and under.
To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, on July 22, at 2 p.m. opening remarks will be held inside the exhibition. Sarindar Dhaliwal and curator Renée van der Avoird, will be in attendance. Additional programming details, including talks, to be announced in fall.
