An artist from Sikar, Rajasthan, born in 1978, Sohan Jakhar completed his bachelors and masters in painting at Rajasthan School of Art in Jaipur and his diploma in advance computer art from Bangalore.
He has a good command over computer art and it can be seen in his works. He clicks pictures of busy streets, vendors and then he adds floral patterns to them.
Sohan uses his skill to address his personal relationship with the cities as well as the ones he has with ancestry. The decorative motifs floating in the background come from the painted fresco on the Havelis (Mansion) of Sekhawati, the home-town of the artist, where he has spent his childhood.
Along with this impression of the motherland, the impact of latest technology can be seen in his paintings, as he has a good command of the computer art software. He uses his technical skill to expand his paintings. Sohan’s current body of work presents the visual dynamics of the roadside bazaar.
According to Sohan, Street Bazaars are surrounded by visual stimulation, noisy visual chaos of vendors and hawkers. These vendors and hawkers dominate busy urban landscapes. Here, a whole new world of images, sounds and gestures is evolving and gaining ground. Visuals of roadside stalls anticipate and announce cultural and technological shifts.
These street vendors offer a critical viewing of the strategic role of popular Indian imagery from the bazaar, “not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process wherein social and subjective identities are formed, bringing in of a new trajectory, while retaining its cultural traditions.”
Sohan says that these roadside stalls dramatise changing personal and social values alongside forging ideological conceptions of the nation itself. The visuals of these stalls grew out of major cultural and technological transformations that occurred in the last decade, which included the impact of consumerism.
These vendors seem to reflect a scenario in a permanent state of transition and moving life. His work and aesthetic delineates the complex interrelations of India’s urban & semi urban scenario.
Sohan has held many solo and group shows in India and worldwide. His work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Singapore, Bristol, New Delhi with solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Mumbai Jaipur, Ahmedabad. His works have been featured In “Indian & Southeast Asian Art” Sotheby’s, New York auction.
