Dileep Sharma 

Born in Mandawar, Rajasthan India 1974, He received B.F.A. at Rajasthan School of Art, Jaipur, Painting, 1996 and M. F. A. at Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay, Print Making, 1998. He held tens of solo exhibition including  Kunwarji , SIPA at the Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, presented by Turmeric Earth,  Crazy Stills , Gallery 28 in Cork Street, London, organized by Visual Art uk,   Kunwarjis Muses , Articullate Gallery, The Yash Birla Group, Mumbai 2007. and  tens of group exhibition including Indian Color  Curatored by Euri Seong, Keumsan Gallery, Seoul, Korea 2007. Recently he awarded Honorable Mention Award, 6th International Biennial of Print, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal 2004 and Awarded by National Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi in 10th Kala Mela, RLKA, Jaipur 2002.

Kunwarji’s Muses, a suite of recent watercolor paintings by Dileep Sharma, is a unifying process of global modernity; a paradigm provoked by the crisis of human identity in the age of virtuality and regime-change.
Kunwarji, the artist’s pseudonym, is a superimposed folksy hero, who prefers to hang out in an interstitial zone bordered by religious symbolisms, ethnic mythologies and urban-pop aesthetics. He is the sole protagonist to witness the assimilation of overwhelming, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnivorous culture of images that spans the globe, into his own brand of potential imagery, to which his muses belong.

Although fashionable, flamboyant and glamorous totems of the contemporary, pulsating with sexual energy, Kunwarji’s Muses refuse to conform to their stereotypes. They are personifications of intellectual, political, emotional, and spiritual variables of an artist’s odyssey through the matrix of folk and popular cultural traditions.
The White, provided as a dramatic backdrop for the images, acknowledges this new kinetic flow of imagery and generates its own momentum that entices the mesmerized viewer to take a plunge into another enchanting image. Artist’s scintillating manner of cropping the images and fragmenting the motifs is almost tantamount to performing an act of defiance and reflects the harsh, predatory urban experience.

The generated imprints of artist’s psyche are idiomatic expressions of the modernist vocabularies and globalist idiosyncrasies. For instance, African Safari, a dusky model wrapped with flowers along with various relevant motifs, mounted on fragmented palms, is a satirical manifestation of the modern-day world full of advertisements, media hype, promotional gimmicks and fleeting fames. The Mascot is a conjunction of current state of regime changes and transitions in patriarchal society and gender roles, which artist delights to symbolize via tomboy cavorting on the back of an anthropomorphized boar, iconic of Varha from creation mythology, who once resurrected the earth from deluge and established the new cycle of life.

Another muse, portraying a beautiful damsel lost in the thoughts of her beloved, is the modern day transformation of the Princess Marooni from “Dhola Marooni”, a romantic folk tale of Rajasthan. Likewise, artist muses upon Yogini, a multi-faceted female from Hindu mythology, who embodies an array of archetypical energies of the divine. She is dedicated to the pursuits of spiritual knowledge and mystical insight and is an associate of Durga, a Hindu Diety. Yogini represents forces of vegetation and fertility, illness and death, yoga and magic.
Vaishali Sharma_Art Critic