As a part of Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2019, we are delighted to present Concrete Ciphers – Pratap Morey’s second solo exhibition at TARQ. In this exhibition, Pratap continues to explore his preoccupations with the constantly morphing artificial geography of urban spaces.
In his wider art practice, Morey uses a range of media, including photographic images, digital archival prints, architectural drawings and engravings. In this show, the artist consciously moves away from the digital image, to work only with lines, be it in the form of drawings, relief sculpture and painting. His imagery focuses on industrial development, specifically the constant unorganized bombardment of cities in the name of redevelopment, which rapidly engulfs the neutral and vacant spaces available. The architectural ciphers in this exhibition are a starting point from which to understand the potential of play in the cityscape. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay written by Meera Menezes.
In her essay she says, ”In his latest body of works Morey filters out the hustle and bustle of the city with its mass of human bodies, its sights, sounds and smells, training his gaze instead on the massive modular blocks of construction material used for large infrastructure projects. Like pieces of a Lego set, they patiently lie in wait for their moment of assembly, when according to a pre-determined plan they will neatly click into place to create a flyover or the stretch of a metro line. But for Morey they represent concrete ciphers, waiting to be decoded and put to more imaginative use. Elevating these humdrum, banal, serial and seemingly soulless creatures of mechanical production, Morey gestures at the roles they could possibly play in creating alternate, utopian worlds.”
