Mythical Creatures – 2378

Gouri Vemula

Gouri Vemula was born in 1972 in Hyderabad. Prior to her engagement with art, Gouri was a national level athlete. She holds a diploma in Painting from Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University, Hyderabad and an MFA in Print Making from Sarojini Naidu School of Art, Hyderabad, along with a masters in Drawing from Vijaymahantesh Lalit Kala Mahavidyalaya, Karnataka.

Vemula’s work is vividly enriched by her skulled use of methods of etching and dry point technique as well as pen and ink drawing. Her works often unravel surreal landscapes with mythic figures of gods and goddesses, animals and human figures as well as magical objects and motifs from her natural world. Her work draws substantial influence from the mythic visual lexicon, but she also reinvents new iconography by situating them in imagines landscapes with unreal animals or sometimes fusing them with objects. Gouri’s work draws our attention to motifs which are part of the art historical legacy of India. She also forges a new idiom by placing them in a contemporary context. Her delicate balancing of the images conjures the amalgamation of real and unreal, mythic and mundane and fantasy and desire.