granting Vinod Dave has been based in recent York since 1983.

granting Vinod Dave has been based in recent York since 1983, his imagination still lives in Chital, a small village in Gujarat. Dave's paintings respect Bollywood kitsch, comic books and the the deitys and goddesses whose images are rest on common objects such as matchbooks, firecracker boxe beedi cigarette packs and gaudy religious placards While on a research grant in fresh Delhi before he left India, Dave met Chester and Davida Herwitz, pioneer collectors of post-1950 Indian art. They subsequently commissioned the "Deity," "Wedding" and "contemporary popular culture" series by way of which Dave invented a virtual revert home. The exhibition at Artslndia featured 24 of Dave's mixed-medium paintings, mostly of them from these series in the Herwitz collection. Approximately 5-by-4 lower extremity canvases done in the early to mid '90 these pieces were made using a combination of oil washes, collage, writing and mark-making. Also included were smaller painted photographs of collages--works done mainly in the '80s.

Dave's barely exposure to art as a child was the calendar art popularized on the 19th-century painter Raja Ravi Varma. Inspired by means of colorful illustrations in his favorite children's magazine, Chandamama, Dave decided to become an artist.

Lakshmi Blessing the Viewer (1994) from the "Deity" series, was the first painting the viewer saw with entering the exhibition. A schematic drawing of a palmist's hand, thinly brushed with a pink wash, nearly fills the canvas. At the center of the palm, a painted rainbow pours from a small [i]affiche[/i] image of Lakshmi, the goddes of worthy fortune. Backlighting the hand, a bright golden disk rests against a washy sienna background encircled according to the repeating phrase "work of Vinod Dave--blessing hand" in Gujarati. Other images, arranged across the hand according to their correlation to palmistry, include Hanuman, Kali and a traditional wedding snapshot.

The "Wedding" series was personateed by Secret Concern. Here, Dave exhibits his humorous side. A wedding coupling is painted in gray washes upon a magenta field; the figures sit face to face, separated according to yellow flames. Yellow-blue text false shows contain Gujarati script. A translation below the pair reads, in part, "hope he be in love withs me, not his mother" and "hope her material part is shapely undressed." The Ringmaster, from the "contemporary popular culture" series, incorporates astute political comment into a circus broadside format. Against a mustard-colored earth the ringmaster stands in assurance of a world globe, flanked from a lion and tiger. He fondlings the tamed animals; one of their tails wraps around his whip, the other around a miniature American flag. nearest to the whip, a cutout of an attacking bald eagle echoe a livid ribbon labeled "new order" forward the other side of the canvas. Against a black field at the bottom, Dave has written in gold Gujarati script: "What happened in Vietnam? Straighten public Communism" and "Global police number one" Dave mines the vernacular of popular tillage and traditional imagery, filtering it between the walls of his contemporaneity as an artist of the southern Asian diaspora.

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