Fairytale, poetry, horror in Tarun Jung Rawat\’s art

NEW DELHI - Young artist Tarun Jung Rawat cuts across literary and artistic references to produce what he describes as \”fairytale art\” that boasts of \”playful magic realism\”.

\”I always try to imbue my works with a quality of playful magic realism. I believe in magic,\” says Rawat, whose exhibition \”Never Mind the Bullfish, Here\’s Spot of T\” is on at the Visual Arts Gallery in India Habitat Centre here.

\”As a child, I was fond of reading books by Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe. The spooky and the sinister quality of their stories held me captive. Later, as I matured into a designer and then as an artist, the sinister aspect of their tales lingered in my mind. And I allowed shades of horror and magic to creep into my works.

\”The T in my \’Bullfish…\’ is double-edged. It stands for the quintessential pot of a lazy \’chai\’ or Tea and the artist in me,\” Rawat, who is in his 30s, told IANS.

His exhibition from April 23 to 27 tells a colourful story of machines and creatures who have been at odds since the industrial revolution. It also comments on the fight between free will and convention through metaphors like the flying wolf, the soaring bird and the magical bullfish.

Rawat, whose funky mixed media art has drawn critical acclaim abroad, uses magic realism, fairytales, fables, jungle tales, graffiti, advertising, poetry and children\’s literature.

The large format works involving giclee print, felt, gold foil, canvas, acrylic, archival paper and mechanical gadgets like levers and pulleys also probe the war between good and evil through dark and coloured spaces within the compositions.

The title of the show, says the artist, a former rock musician and designer, has been inspired by the \”Never Mind the Bollocks, Here\’s The Sex Pistols\” by the Sex Pistols, the seminal music band from the UK that de-constructed musical language.

\”The spirit to challenge and conquer is integral to \’Never Mind the Bullfish…\’ Another thread that binds \’Bullfish…and Sex Pistols\’ is the bold collage style graphic imagery, a look developed for the Sex Pistols by the artist and graphic designer Jamie Reid,\” Rawat says.

The leitmotif of the exhibition, \”Never Mind the Bullfish, Here\’s Spot of T\”, is the large playful diptych of a friendly yellow bullfish that swims in a sea of mythical creatures. Little boy T rides the fish with a happy smile on his face brandishing a golden bell tied to a golden rope. The bell chimes as the fish navigates the water.

The mixed media composition uses acrylic colours, giclee prints, archival paper, canvas and goldfoil in the style of children\’s book illustrations.

Apart from bullfish, the artist has also used birds in various stages of flight aided by machines as an idiom to express his \”quest for freedom and new images of creativity\”. \”Birds form for an important aspect of my work. They epitomise freedom and possess immediate potential for communication,\” Rawat said.

He has been influenced by the Fluxus group of artists in Germany, Swiss painter-sculpture Jean Tinguely, known for his \”sculptural machines and kinetic art\” and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, the Jewish Hungarian painter-photographer, who believed in construction and advocated fusion of industry technology and arts.

\”I have watched Tarun\’s works for three years. I wanted to bring together his entire language of working with the narrative of storytelling and layers. The fact that he belongs to a musical background makes him so different,\” curator Alka Pande told IANS.

Rawat, a National School of Design graduate, departs from his peers in his stylisation of captions. They are short limericks narrating the essence of his art.

A giant triptych, \”Flying Free in the heart of a Wolf\” is expressed thus: \”When darkness falls, and creatures crawl, go let your spirits fly, leap into dark, with fearless heart, a giant wolf into the sky…\”

Rawat is collaborating with a seven-year-old girl from the Salaam Balak Trust for his next show and is also preparing for an exhibition in Vienna.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at