If we accept that art is a metacognitive activity than we could say that creative expression ensures one thing, it helps to transform the world around you by using significant traits of your own self-perceived identity and interpretation of reality through artistic creation, which exists as a representational reality. In this creative endeavor artists struggle against their socially imposed identity and most often this whole creative process turns out as a medium of self-realization of one’s own intrinsic self. If we try to look at the 4 decades artistic journey of Nayanaa Vijay Kanodia, we will find that her story of becoming an artist is the story of gaining her desired course of life defying the eventuality of ascribed social design. Born into an upper middle class Indian family, a class torn between modern pretensions and revivalist hangover, it was tough for Nayanaa Kanodia to prove not only for others but also to herself that she wanted to become an artist…a painter. Nayanaa recalls that during her younger years she was constantly painting even when everyone was thinking that she was going to become an economist as she was enrolled as a student of economics at Delhi University. She says that it was always on her mind to work extra hard with her painting as she was not attending art school like other artists. Lack of formal training enabled her to bring patterns of strong individuation in her work. This also helped her to avoid academic obsession for the hierarchy of high and low art and helped her to present the dynamics of social reality in the concrete frames of virtuality.
Considered as the foremost artist of the L’Art Naif genre, Nayanaa Kanodia’s colorful images represent the essence of Indian reality through the visual symbols of everyday life. Through her brightly colored paintings with figures looking straight out from the canvas Kanodia brings a contemplative mirror effect in the viewer’s mind, in which the duality of observer and observed gradually disappears. Another chief element of her work is multiple narrations in one frame, where she presents a picture within a picture to indicate toward the experiential perplexity rooted in the multiplicity of reality. This multiple reality is itself a manifestation of the uniqueness of the Indian situation where, in the words of Nayanaa Kanodia, westernization took place without replacing basic traditional traits of identity which is the root of Indian society. This comes out predominantly in her use of extremely bright colors, with vivacious depiction of signs, symbols and characters of present-day Indian reality.
In her more than 4 decades artistic career, Nayanaa Kanodia’s work has gotten widespread national and international recognition. She has participated in many group shows nationally and internationally including New York in 1988; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai in 1997 & 1998; Dubai in 1998, 2012, 2013, 2014 , London in 2001, 2002 ,2006, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014, ‘Centre Regional D’Art Contemporain’, Sete, France in 2001; Washington in 2001; Paris in 2002; Hong Kong in 2005, 2012, Singapore in 2006, 2011, ‘The Ueno Royal Museum’, Tokyo in 2007; South Africa in 2007. Nayanaa is the first Indian of non-British origin whose works are in the collection of the ‘Paintings in Hospitals’, UK previously named as British Museum. Nayanaa’s work is held in many public and private collections in India and abroad. In 2001 she was invited by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London to exhibit her work and to give a demonstration of her painting technique. Her paintings have recently been published in an international book, Women in Art, a rare honor to be chosen from among women artists all over the world.
