DHRUVA MISTRY: NATURE SPIRITS
October 09 - November 04 , 2025
Nature Spirits brings together a selection of
Dhruva Mistry’s sculptures, drawings, reliefs, and prints made in the decade
between 1983, when he ended a course
of study at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), and 1993, when he was invited
to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors (FRSS) and received a
prestigious commission to install a series of massive works in Victoria Square,
the city of Birmingham’s most important public space. The title of the show takes
its cue from nymphs, yakshis, fauns and other protective beings that
populate the display, many connected with natural features like rivers and
trees.
Mistry’s Indian upbringing and arts
education had acquainted him with principles of mass and volume employed in
classical Indian sculpture. He had developed a fascination for hybrid
human-animal creatures like the wish-fulfilling cow Kamadhenu (often depicted
with a woman’s face) and the Buraq, a winged equine with human head which
Muhammad is said to have ridden to Jerusalem and thence to heaven. In Britain these
formal and thematic ideas were strengthened by his exposure to Assyrian,
Egyptian and post-Renaissance European traditions during visits to institutions
like the British Museum. For the first year of what was meant to be a
single-year stint at RCA, he produced very little work of his own, instead
absorbing lessons from modernists like Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, and Constantin
Brancusi. Picasso’s Vollard Suite directly impacted the series titled From
the North, three prints from which are displayed in this show. Egyptian and
Greek versions of the Sphinx, the Assyrian Lamassu, a deity combining aspects
of human, bird and beast, and Picasso’s reinterpretation of legendary beings
like fauns and the minotaur, all fed into the artist’s preoccupation with
hybridity.
With his scholarship period
extended, Mistry began a productive period of experimentation with English chalk,
a soft rock that can be worked easily but is extremely brittle and delicate.
Simultaneously, he created sculptures in plaster, fiberglass and bronze, some
of which feature in this exhibition. He initiated the series Reguarding
Guardians which annexed his personal mythology to the variegated legends he
had assimilated from numerous cultures and historical periods. His work
manifested a monumentality that paralleled the traditions of antiquity from
which he drew inspiration, being imbued with a sense of something both
experimental and traditional, modern and classical.
The dual quality of seeming at once
old and new made Mistry’s sculpture a natural fit for grand public art, yet it
was a rare accolade for an artist from India in his mid-thirties to receive a
commission like Victoria Square. It placed him in the top echelon of his
profession and paved the way for his appointment as Head of Sculpture and Dean
of the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda, at the age of just forty. Among the
highlights of Nature Spirits is a model of River, the central
sculpture in the Victoria Square assemblage that has gained the fond colloquial
name Floozie in the Jacuzzi.
Girish
Shahane
Images
Installation
Press
