Amol K. Patil
Lines Between the City
TKG+, Taipei

Prior to being an exhibition, Amol K. Patil’s “Lines Between the City” was a route. On one side, a wall was painted with an unbroken gray horizon; on the other, a rough plywood scaffold inhibited movement through the space. Nods to the chawls of Mumbai, these makeshift margins imposed a new, brief line through the city—a tangent with the same homogenizing impulse as any other whim of urban development. This choice reframed the gallery not as a place of exception where the work could transcend the everyday, but instead infused it with the stifling mundanity of contemporary public life. Patil’s clever architecture transformed encounters with the paintings and sculptures that congregated throughout into run-ins like we might anticipate in the streets.

Traversing Patil’s wall alongside the audience was an unusual procession. With amorphous “bodies” that resemble the aftermath of fingers trawling through silt, these figures that make up the artist’s Lines Between the City series (2023), perched on the slash of dull gray paint that wrapped around the gallery. Limbs erupted from these bronze reliefs at angles that defy anatomy, muddying any certainty about whether these mounds of clay-like flesh represent individuals or collectives. In a single “body,” one arm flops in supplication while another tenses with the sinewy rigidity of labor; one leg braces as if burdened while another gaily kicks its heels and points its toes. Though the wall propped it all up, it was never quite clear whether these individuals were engaged in its construction or in defiance against it; whether they were made or unmade by this bond.