Antonio Puri

Excerpt from her essay from the catalog Layering Constructions at the Delaware Art Museum, 2016

by Margaret Winslow

Associate Curator for Contemporary Art

Delaware Art Museum

Chandigarh has served as inspiration for Puri’s work. In the artist’s recent series of stacked paintings, Puri simultaneously constructs and disassembles the notion of painting. The layered forms are placeholders for an imagined form that extends past its current configuration into three-dimensional space, becoming the architectural building blocks of entire cities. In this way, the artist’s monumental intention is testing the boundaries of structure and the conceptions of media specificity. Puri similarly employs the materials associated with painting to undertake a personal journey. The beads, drips, threads, and marginalia that layer the surfaces of the multiple panels in the Chandigarh series signify the fragility of memory, the infinite network of the human race, and the tenuous links that connect us.

Hofmann explains that the relationship between form, color, and texture “is the external expression of an orderly internal process of development.” The physical and conceptual layering that is integral to the practice of Antonio Puri indicates an understanding of the formal limitations inherent in creating an illusion of endless space and the insistence to push those boundaries to their extreme.

installation of Homage to Le Corbusier at the Delaware Art Museum, 2016