Many contemporary Indian artists who show their work in a the West tend to stay away from using traditional elements in they art due to its “cliché stigma”, says a spokesman for the Nature Morte gallery from New Delhi (D9). The South Indian artist L.N. Tallur, on the other hand, creates sculptures that seem to find a balance between the fading of tradition and its perennial residue. In Obituary Notice (2013), priced at $65,000, the artist recreated the Nataraja by removing the dancing Hindu god Shiva from the centre of its bronze reliquary and replacing it with burnt pieces of wood that allude to the religion’s cremation rites.
