Originally born in India, lives and works in New York,
California and India. Artist, Preet Srivastava
questions personal and political identity by direct
observation of human nature and form, vaticinations
are immured on canvas.
Our time finds itself steeped deep in contradiction.
While technological advances in communication have
allowed for global intimacy, we seem to have lost a
real sense of "domesticity" - a core geography and way
of life we call "home". On the one hand, we find
individual significance through group identification
with larger cultural categories such as race and
gender. On the other hand these very categories
dissolve our individualities. While international
awareness allows us to understand the depth of
systematic cultural oppression - the idea that we as a
people are less than - the political scope of
defeating western imperialism isolates us from our
individual traits. We divert our individuality to
support a wider political alliance. The result of
retiring the intimate personal for the supra-political
has been global networks along side fragmented
individualities- a dichotomy of unity and disunity
between political recognition and personal
representation.
The paintings of Preet Srivastava have been the
alliance between the political and personal. The
paintings arise from concrete problems so they reveal
their value in concrete applications.They possess a
significance greater than their origins and a
relevance wider than their original applications; It
is that desire that constitutes the primordial why.
Occurence and content stand in immediate correlation
with outer circumstance. A Figurative essence is
directly observed and transformed from oil onto
canvas. The works present a fortuitious perspective
that allows us to transcend boundaries of past,
present, and future of content of figure, herself,
and the world we live in.
The ambiguity of her art bridges the personal with the
political by allowing overlap of content necessary to
wage the war against dominant paradigms while
upholding the purity of personal identification.
Amorphous boundaries of her artistic representation
transcend the deeper mentality of cultural
assumptions, providing a complete personality which
identifies larger political struggles as well as
personal stories - an identification which the artist
herself has not fully comprehended - a spacious
definition to self that she holds sacred - an infinite
horizon of identity that Preet is simultaneously
finding as well as pursuing. It is this pursuit of
awakening that drives her, attracts the audience and
answers the contradiction of the post-discourse.
"Its about investing in something you believe in. The power of art."
Preet Srivastava's paintings exhibit an impressionistic and expressionistic abstraction of the figure. She is trained by her Father, Sargent, Frida Kahlo, Basquiat, Vaikunttam, and Brian Blood in their expression of figure, landscape and emotion. She is inspired most by her Mother.
Copyright 1999 by Vikas Prasad Srivastava
