VALAY GADA
Valay Gada is an artist and designer whose works reflect his concerns linked to the impact of rapid urbanization and man’s relationship with nature. Valay’s sculptures of botanical forms, scaled up to larger than life proportions, articulate a heightened artistic appreciation of nature’s beauty, as also the importance of plants in climate change and as sources of therapy.
Born into a Jain family, Jainism’s core tenets of non-violence, asceticism and mindful living have closely shaped Valay’s aesthetics. His works emphasise the inter-connectedness of living things, the understanding that every action has the potential to cause suffering to another and one of the keys to contain this is to consume ethically and sustainably. As his work matures it has become more political in its response to human and animal rights, freedom of speech and sexuality.
Valay has shown internationally at galleries/fairs in Germany and Australia (National Art School, Sydney), and in several cities in India. He received the “Elle Décor International Design Award” for Young Talent of the Year 2014 and “Trends Excellence in Architecture and Design” award 2016.
Valay lives and works in New Delhi.
About The Work
Courtesy of Gallery Espace, New Delhi
In “Paper Dreams”, Gada returns to his large-scale botanicals inspired by his solitary walks in the forest, where amid the russets and browns of the parched earth of an Indian summer he encounters huge busts of fluorescent colour and drifts of fallen shocking cerise pink petals of the bougainvillea, also known as paper flowers. For Gada the flowers are a paradox, as their delicate translucent origami blooms symbolise for him the fragility of his hopes and dreams that quickly wither under the harsh glare of reality and his aspirations are dashed to the floor where he treads softly on his dreams through pools of colour. However, bougainvillea is extremely robust and flower in the harshest and most arid of climates as they require minimal water so have adapted to flourish in dry conditions. Therefore, even in despair the flowers create beautiful drifts of coloured oases in a parched, grey environment. Large floral sculptures climb and flourish from the walls of the gallery, Gada employs a process called repoussé and chasing, used mostly by jewellers for embossed designs, to create the delicate veins and textures of the fragile flowers. The artist has distilled the heat of a shimmering Indian summer’s day into his art, but the flowers and dreams are no longer ephemeral but a moment in time frozen for perpetuity.