Mequitta Ahuja
Birthright, 2017.
Statements artist:
Painting has brought me the things I most desire, from friendship to rigorous intellectual engagement. My works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Baltimore Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Saatchi Gallery and The Brooklyn Museum, among other venues. Studying the history of art, I constantly discover painting in its diverse conceptions across time and geography. I get obsessed with little things like Goya’s calling card clutched in a magpie’s beak and Zurburan’s cartellino on a painting of the crucifixion. I am motivated by big ideas like painting as a record of our changing notions of beauty or how to make paintings that communicate clearly and engage the viewer in the production of meaning. My unique ethnic heritage; I am the daughter of an African American mother and a South Asian Indian father, informs my work as well. For many years, this cultural mix was the central theme of my work. As I get older, struggles with identity fade, and issues of the body, mind and our unique place in history rise to the surface. One thing that has remained constant in my work is my use of my own image as a form for my evolving concerns, both personal and painterly. I am an introvert; I spend my days thinking, reading, writing, drawing and painting. I was born in Grand Rapids and now live in Baltimore, MD with my scientist husband and our two cats.
Close Quote, 2017.
Shipping Slip, 2017.
My new self-portraits are not about myself. These works are about figurative painting and the artist as picture-maker. The figurative painting tradition, I argue, is the unseen made visible through a meaningful fiction. Meaningful fictions include painting conventions established over centuries and displayed throughout museums. I make the language of the figurative tradition clear by simplifying forms to basic shapes and by visually cataloging common motifs, such as: hand gestures, swags of fabric, meeting the viewer’s gaze, creased paper presented as trompe l’oeil, architecture that frames a narrative, one-point perspective, the allegorical figure and pyramid and grid compositions. In individual works and in groups of works, I focus on essential issues of picture-making such as scale, primary color and underlying geometric structure, visually cataloging painting conventions while using those conventions to make new meanings. I repurpose ideas and approaches to painting across time and geography including Egyptian form, Giotto frescoes, Hindu figuration and early American painting. In many of my works, I depict paintings within paintings, representing paintings as objects that come from specific cultural traditions. They shed and gain meaning as they move through time, place and through the hands of their owners. By working strategically within painting’s pasts, I knit my contemporary concerns, personal and painterly into the centuries old conversation of representation and recast self-portraiture as a treatise on picture-making.
Autocartography I, 2012.
See Saw, 2014.
My work is a form of tribute, analysis and intervention: tribute, out of sincere admiration for the figurative tradition; analysis, by making something vast comprehensible to both myself and to my viewers and intervention, by positioning a woman-of-color as primary picture-maker, in whose hands the figurative tradition is refashioned.(texts website artist)