A blue figure – part Christ Pantocrator, part Indian murti – raises its arms among the constellations. A flock of birds whirls around a body suspended in the void. And the titan Atlas bears a fractured civic world under an inverted firmament.
Gautam Jhanjee’s new exhibition Axis (Shine Dome, to 21 July) looks at the relationship between the human figure, architecture, landscape, and spatial order.
Eight large paintings — bold, striking, mythic — each represent a different kind of order: elemental, figural, cyclical, primordial, seasonal, social, liturgical and cosmic.
“The exhibition is really a response to Canberra’s geometry,” Jhanjee said. “It’s a planned city. The plan is inherently axial. Axis also speaks of an order. There’s something in my work that dovetails with that.
“The human figure in most of my works is presented as an ordering principle. Things move around the figure, but the figure is central. There’s an echo there of my work, Canberra, and the way it’s designed.”
Thus, in Axis (Geometer), concentric circles echo Canberra’s radial plan. The painting combines stillness with movement: Canberra’s plan is fixed, while people move through it.
In The Sixth Bird, birds circulate around a seated figure, slightly yogic, echoing Canberra’s circles and radial plan.
A New Spring has the freshness and optimism of a windy day in Canberra, petals tossed about by the wind.
Jhanjee has lived in Canberra for nearly a decade. Born in Mumbai to Indian and European parents, he worked as an architect for 20 years, including running a London practice.
In 2015, he decided that career had reached a natural completion, wound his practice down, and devoted himself to painting.
His architectural practice, he says, was instrumental in terms of how to draft, draw, form and compose an image.
“There’s a certain approach to form, to shape, perspective, line, to construction, to what bears load, to materiality, certainly to space, and also to time.”
He and his Australian wife moved to Canberra in 2017 – and he says that since coming here, he has never looked back.
“There’s something quite magical, because Canberra is both a very international national capital, a globally plugged-in place, and the bush capital,” Jhanjee said. “It’s got wide open skies. It’s got beautiful vistas and views. It’s got the lake, around which everything’s centred.”
Jhanjee draws heavily on Jung, mythology, and sacred traditions.
“The role of an artist really is to say something of the age and something of the collective unconscious,” Jhanjee said. “The goal with painting is to get at something that’s archetypal, universal.”
His figures are not intended as individuals with personalities; they stand for broader human, civic or cosmic conditions.
“I don’t want it to be a person as such. I want it to be an idea or an archetype.”
Before Name and Form looks at primordial order: birds are in a dark, endless void before form emerges, before there is identity, before things are named.
The exhibition’s cosmic anchor, Christ of the Third Millennium, looks “at what the iconographic image would be in this day and age, for today’s zeitgeist”.
Atlas strains, reflecting what Jhanjee sees as a world at a turning point, a period of uncertainty and transition.
“I think it’s palpable,” Jhanjee said. “You see it at all sorts of levels. You see it geopolitically. Arguably, one might see it spiritually.”
The role of these symbolic paintings, he believes, is orientation.
“They tell us where we are. They tell us what’s going on in the world. They tell us about ourselves.”
Axis is free and open to the public. Jhanjee will be present during the exhibition.
Venue: Dorothy Hill Room, Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra. 17–21 July, Fri, Sat, Mon and Tue, 11am–4pm; Sun, 1.30–4pm.
The exhibition is supported by the ACT Government as part of its City of Design Project Fund.
