Subcontinent
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Home
  • Exhibitions
  • Visit
  • Press
  • About Us
Menu

Energy Fields: Jangarh Singh Shyam

Current exhibition
9 October - 29 November 2025
  • Works
  • Overview
Jangarh Singh Shyam Untitled (Peacock and Mongoose), 2001 Acrylic on Paper 22 x 28 in.
Jangarh Singh Shyam
Untitled (Peacock and Mongoose), 2001
Acrylic on Paper
22 x 28 in.
View works
To enter Jangarh’s world, you have to play along, peel off reality and believe in the aural world.
Jangarh Singh Shyam’s images are electric and pulsate like energy fields. To enter Jangarh’s world, you have to play along, peel off reality and believe in the aural world. We discovered Jangarh at different times in our lives, but the effect was the same - we were mesmerized by both - his world and his genius. And like all good things, over time, Jangarh has come to mean many things to us. 
His paintings have a quiet sense of humour that is easy to miss, the silliness of an expression, the googly eyes of a bird, the lolling tongue of an effeminate lion. He titles his works often specifically, naming peacocks, snakes, trees, airplanes, but the creatures themselves look nothing like what they’re “supposed” to be. A mighty Peepal becomes a thin green sapling balancing dozens of birds. An airplane feels woven from soft rattan. A sunflower grows a tree-like trunk and petals that wave like the limbs of a hydra. He’s teasing us, toying with our sense of what things should look like, and that’s where the joy begins. 
There are four paintings of peacocks in this exhibition, and they are all mutually unintelligible. The earliest, from 1984, shows a bright yellow bird with cobalt and ultramarine plumage. The latest resembles a wide-eyed green rooster running towards you, chased by a pink mongoose mid cha-cha. It’s hard to tell where the mongoose’s tongue ends and the peacock’s crest begins.
Jangarh’s paintings move between two modes: the iconic and the narrative. His narrative works are often scenes of animals simply going about their business, and yet they carry a quiet tenderness. Pairs recur everywhere: white tigers hunting together, birds flying side by side, while mythical snakes tango around. This deep valuing of the mate, the companion, is hard to shake. As if, in Jangarh’s world, like in Noah’s Ark, all creatures come in twos.
What unites his work and sets it apart from almost anything that has come before or after is the life force he infuses into it. While the paintings pulsate with the energy inherent in his use of waves of coloured dots over flat applications of paint, in his Rotring pen works he elevates it to a fever pitch, where the deities and animals seem to vibrate and distort with that energy. 
 
Dhwani Gudka and Keshav Mahendru
 
Share
  • Facebook
  • X
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Back to exhibitions
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Subcontinent
Site by Artlogic
Instagram, opens in a new tab.

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Be a part of our mailing list

Thank you for visiting Subcontinent's website. If something piqued your interest, write to us. We'll reach out to you soon.

Join mailing list

* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy (available on request). You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.