California, July 12: A solo exhibition ‘Urban Avatara- A New Mythopoesis’ has been organized here at California by USA based Odia artist Birendra Pani.

The ongoing exhibition (July 8 to July 27) at Gallery Fresh Point in San Diego portrays Indian contemporary visual artist Pani’s three decade long artistic journey from Odisha to California in the USA.

The exhibition comprises drawing-based paintings; it endeavors to create a critical reflective space with respect to the present consumerist culture and human life in a neoliberalized world.

Deriving from everyday life experience, the artist has focused on the schizophrenic condition of human life- the extreme form of urbanism, capitalism and consumerist culture and conflict of human nature and with the larger nature; the real and unreal, and new forms of distortion in human life through the pop and kitsch imageries and sometime in a comical way or with the element of satire.

The acrylic on canvas works in ‘Urban Avatara’ series address the ironies and contradictions of consumer culture; and at the same time the negligence towards local culture, history and rural life in contemporary times- creating a new ‘mythopoesis’ through visual language.

Drawing references from mythological and yogic postures, some of the works invoke to a new form of balance in human life.

“The drawings in this series of works have sometimes evolved as an unconscious process of art making and sometimes exudes as the magic of life”, said Pani.