Art musings

We’ve known Sanjay Dhawan for his paintings, sculptures and wall art installations. The unique feature of his art being the medium—corrugated cardboard medium. There is something intricate and intriguing about his art.

Not content with being the only one to use the medium in an exclusive fashion to create art, he constantly experiments and innovates to push the boundaries further. It is in this direction that he has created a new type of sculptures and named the series as ‘Sculptures Gen-X’. “The inspiration to create this series of sculptures comes from the saying, ‘The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before’ by Neil Gaiman,” Dhawan says.

He tells that the motivation to experiment and create original and exceptional works of art comes from the aspiration to stand out and make a name for self and country in the highly competitive international art market.

Art for this self-taught artist means hard work and precision. Every sculpture of this new series has taken somewhere around 15 days to 2 months. “Each sculpture is made by assembling thousands of hand-painted pieces of corrugated cardboard, each pasted one at a time in a frame/enclosure. Just to give you an idea, a sculpture of size 13.2 x 13.2 inches is made up of about 7500 such pieces,” he explains. 

An engineer by qualification and artist by heart, he will be putting up his 10th solo exhibition soon.

— Gurnaaz Kaur