Art historically, architecture and sculpture have been intimately allied, both in terms of usage of materials and three-dimensional form, technical finesse and aesthetic beauty. In today’s context, in inter-disciplinary forms of practice, architecture and sculpture offer the integration of form and content, artist and audience and as a space of free discourse to rethink the relation between figure and field, sculpture, interior design and architecture.

In this piece at Godrej Industrial Limited, Mumbai, Indranil Garai explores a large-scale relief sculpture that breaks through the regular geometry of a frame. Designed aesthetically around the reception area, the separate reliefs in fibre-glass offer a narrative of nature and urban life, rhythmically moving over the reception area into the interior spaces of the office, presenting a dialogic space for both the visitors and the employees. An evocation of contemporary experience becomes an inspiration for Garai, who reconstructs forms from memory, art historical references and everyday life. Via these frontal vertical forms, Garai achieves a balance of quasi-abstract and realistic qualities, the surface patterns elongated and compressed and embellished with an antique metallic colour, formally resonates with expressive scale and purpose. The colossal spatial relationships and visual configurations in this piece induce the fluid plastic aspects of relief sculpture, in an energetic movement of forms from one panel to the other, drawing the viewer into an aesthetic dialogue of nature and culture. Experimental in form and material, meaning in Garai’s art is shaped by an individual inventive interrogation of urbanism, a response to fantasy/play, illusion and reality that transmit the nuances of contemporary experience.