Jitish Kallat  (Indian, 1974) 

Jitish Kallat (Indian, b.1974) is a painter, sculptor, photographer, and installation artist best known for work that celebrates the city of Mumbai, using a visual language derived from popular advertising. Born in Mumbai, Kallat studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art, and rejected his training in Modernism and abstraction to create early works based on references to the billboards and popular culture of Mumbai. Kallat portrays the socio-economic and political circumstances of the city in a way that emphasizes its liveliness and resilience. His Dawn Chorus (2007) series, for example, shows street urchins with hair that forms a web of traffic and pedestrians; he mounts these paintings on sculptures made from wall decorations found in a 120-year-old train station in Mumbai. Kallat’s photographic work includes a series called Cenotaph (A Deed Of Transfer) (2007), which documents the demolition of a row of slums, suggesting the progressive but sometimes brutal consequences of modernization in Mumbai. Kallat’s Public Notice Works (2003–2010) series—large-scale installations that displayed Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech of 1947 on a reflective surface, Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 speech on fiberglass letters, and Swami Vivekananda’s speech during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on LED displays—were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kalla’s work has been exhibited at the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe and the Tate Modern in London, and his work is held in several collections, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Saatchi collection. He lives and works in Mumbai.