What gives Umesh's practice its bite is not biography but a rare breadth of material and medium.
Umesh S grew up working the land in Bhojpur, Bihar. When his family, like millions of others, was forced to abandon farming, they also severed ties with knowledge systems, communal bonds, and ways of life carried through generations. This rupture forms the foundation of his practice, carrying both grief and, as he describes it, “a rage over fading respect for the farmer’s intelligence which sustained entire communities, and through them, all of us.”
The artist sidesteps familiar framings of loss, whether as rural idyll or dispossession. What gives his practice its bite is not biography but a rare breadth of material and medium. It is a rigorous scatter spanning painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and installation. The artist often incorporates material such as obsolete tools, fragments of farming equipment, coiled ropes, and parasitic wood. Meticulously gathered from his hometown of Bhojpur and from Varanasi, where he now lives, each material holds agrarian memory and marks absence.
Though absent from the exhibition, these materials linger in the works, creating a sense of unease and connecting formal experimentation to cultural memory and loss. In this exhibition, the terracotta sculptures most clearly embody this material continuity. They depict sprouting bodies — twisted, contorted forms of farmers and tools, that recur across his paintings and prints, often in uneasy relation to one another. The jagged surfaces and dark, earthen palettes make no effort to sentimentalise. Even in the recorded performance on view, the body carries this defiance. Umesh’s practice is thus best understood as an accumulation rather than a series of single gestures.
The intensity of the art comes from rage transformed into aesthetic aggression. The works enter the gallery already at a remove but remain charged by the loss they embody. This is perhaps their most compelling quality — a blunt refusal to make loss comfortable, or palatable, for urban consumption.
