Beauty in the broken

National Award winner Manjunath Honnapura’s exhibition, The Art of Reconstruction, was on display recently at the MKF Museum of Art in Bengaluru. For his previous award-winning painting, Honnapura used vibrant colours and etchings on metal plates, and in 2022, he received the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi. With this new exhibition, he has stripped the world back to explore different materials and push his boundaries.

The Japanese and Buddhist philosophy of construction and reconstruction inspires the Art of Reconstruction. Japan has a culture of rebuilding, repairing, and reconstructing itself from earthquakes and tsunamis, explained Honnapura. In the Japanese art of kintsugi, cracks and breaks in pottery are mended with rare metals, like gold, highlighting the flaws as part of the object’s story rather than disguising them. Honnapura’s work is similar. Old vinyl record covers and magazines have been cut and transformed into leaves. A black-and-white photograph has been enlarged and pasted onto fabric, hanging like a curtain in the frame, offering a glimpse into a bygone era. The artwork’s frames and canvas follow the same theme of destruction and reconstruction, said Honnapura. Trees were felled, cut up and turned into picture frames and other trees were chopped up, pulped, mashed, boiled, squashed and dried into paper now on the gallery’s walls. Being the son of a farmer, nature creeps through the exhibition like a vine along the wall. The exhibition did not set out to be political, but when water, trees and nature become part of the power struggle, even art is drawn into the conversation.  Honnapura’s works depict trees squeezing out of concrete walls, taking centre stage, and folding themselves into origami shapes. Although the exhibition is nearly devoid of colour, it is an argument for hope. What is broken can be fixed. What is lost can be rebuilt. Although water is scarce, it will rain again soon.