Tuesday 21 June 2022
Sunday 5 June 2022
Wherefor Indigo?
Simply put, The Singh Twins are the Gilbert & George for a new age. Not only in the fact that two artists work on images together, planing, working side by side, but now in the bright, colourful, full- size display sense too.
The Singh Twins and Gilbert & George have other commonalities too. Both owe their Pop allegiances to forebears like the American Andy Warhol and a colourful, in your face, Pop Art style. That is, although The Twins (Amrit Singh and Rabindra Kaur Singh) hail from Richmond, Surrey, England and Gilbert (Proesch) was born in San Martin de Tor, Italy while George (Passmore) comes from Plymouth, England.
Pop Art, it has been debated, began in England with Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, and not in Pittsburg, America with Andrew Warhola (Warhol), so it is fitting, and understandable, that The Twins and Gilbert & George should champion and reinvigorate stylistic refernces to Pop Art.
Differences between the artists 'Twins' and G&G, other than chosen subject matter, are revealed in their backgrounds. While G & G's style has a stripped down Warhol style (seen in his pieces like the full-size 82 ¾ by 46 ¼ in. 'Elvis' series), with additional echoes of stained glass church windows where their sexuality is constantly on display, the Twins come to Warhol from an Indian miniature heritage, where artworks are meticulously built from multiple images to tell an overarching 'story'. The result being an enlarged 'miniature' storytelling style but, in series like 'Slaves of Fashion' reveal the inequalities and sujugations of capitalist, colonial materialism in a bright, colourful, digitally enlarged 'miniature' graphic style reminiscent of Gilbert and George.
From The Singh Twins 'Slaves of Fashion' exhibition at Colchester’s Firstsite, it was 'Indigo - Colour of India' , which tantalised me. In 2019 I had been in Bangladesh, researching and writing, and learned a little of the importance of historical 'indigo' to that country (once seen as India's Eastern Bengal), its colonial past and the lengths colonial masters had gone to quell the year long 'Indigo Revolt' in 1859, in the name of capitalist materialism.
Indigo blue still is one of the colours of modern Bangladesh, and I had noted this while writing about Bangladesh artist Farida Zaman. It was most probably that experience which prompted me to use 'Indigo' by The Singh Twins as the cover for issue 54 of The Blue Lotus magazine.
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