24.10.-27.11.2009

In a recent essay, artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal characterised abstractionist action-painter Deviprasad C Rao as an "artist of the floating world". This was not a literal reference to the almost exclusively figurative Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e in technique and style, but rather to its general sensibility, where each work is a reflection of contemporary life, encapsulated as a suspended moment in time.

What gives Rao's work its visual appeal are the sensual and childlike properties of his line, executed in an intuitive but controlled version of what Breton called "psychic automatism", modified by the dynamic physicality of techniques initiated by Jackson Pollack. The subconsciously inspired imagery is infused with an unobtrusively Asian sensibility in the positioning of forms. The figures that can be discerned even in his most
abstract works are often evocative of tribal art. Compositionally, the works have a Zen-like quality.

While Rao's visual lexicon is a constantly evolving hybrid of archetype, popular culture, and prophesy, at the root of his oeuvre lies a discernible ethic: a concern for spirituality and nature, executed with an understated elegance that is at once simple and complicated, through which the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary.

Deviprasad C Rao's works are available in private and public
collections in countries such as Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Mexico and UK.