Palo Gallery presents Sagarika Sundaram: Source, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York City. Presenting monumental wall-based and free-standing felted pieces, the exhibition builds on the artist’s investigations into the ancient magic of the textile arts and the potentialities of hand-dyed, raw natural fiber. The exhibition will run from November 3, 2023 – February 4, 2024, and will be accompanied by a full color catalog.
Sundaram’s otherworldly works unite a painter’s sense of color, a sculptor’s perception of space, and a dancer’s feeling for movement. The exhibition will feature several multi-layered textile compositions as well as a series of complex, three-dimensional hanging installations that bind together organic and constructed forms. Drawing extensively on natural imagery, these works meditate on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural and the interior from the exterior, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality.
The scale of these works, defying dimensions as they climb from floors to walls and into the air, disclose the intense investment of labor that goes into their making, harkening back to the early days when such work was wrought entirely by hand. Deeply rooted in the landscapes that sheep-herders call home, wools and dyes from as far as the Himalayas and as near as the Hudson Valley form the raw materials for the ancient felt-making techniques that drive the construction of these works.
This collision of worlds—between the local and global, the ancient and modern, and the human and natural—speaks to Sundaram’s own heritage, growing up between India and Dubai, and to the harmonious marriage of labor, materials, and form that underlie thousands of years of textile tradition.
