Work · 1982–2020
Gymnast
At the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982, Jai Zharotia watched a young gymnast at her floor exercise. It started a subject he never left: almost forty years later, in his last years, he was still drawing the body in balance.
The early gymnasts of the 1980s are painted on paper in washes of colour, the body stretched into a ring or caught in mid-air, as if seen in a flash of lightning. Alongside them he made the Bull and Woman works, the other great study of force and balance from those years.
In his last years, from about 2017 to 2020, the gymnast returned in a new form. Sheet after sheet shows a figure reduced to a few black or brown brushstrokes and round joints: standing on one hand, hanging from a trapeze, folding in half. Some stand alone on white paper, others on grey grounds brushed in a single sweep. They are among the most direct and confident works of his life.
A gymnast turns the impossible into the possible, but only by holding her balance. Jai saw everyday life the same way: a trapeze act, with fear and the risk of falling always close by.
“Her body was so flexible, fast and rhythmic that it sparked me to do a series on the subject. I was able to achieve the energy that captured the truthful expression of being the gymnast.”Jai Zharotia
Works from this series will be added soon.