I make objects and paintings that appropriate ancient artifacts, religious icons and modernist materiality from the expansive pool of an art history that stretches back over 30,000 years. The work centres around my affection for the distinctive swagger involved in nineteenth century personal collections such as the John Soane Museum; their suppression, superimposition or regeneration of places, cultures and auras into a personal collection, through a framing or re-framing, an extraction or a squeezing together is something my practice looks to embrace.
The work might be organized or edited in groups that function as self-reflexive sets that sample swatches or scraps of painterly language, events in our history of making, and the quazi-religious sacrality these bring with them. These sets embody the edit, of personal selection and forced hierarchies, that might point towards a vast archive, fragments that hint at an expansive whole. The works while being materially generous, sometimes self-indulgent and awkward, could function as empty, mute containers for objects and figures elsewhere, as they look to search for a place within an expanded history of art objects.
Website: www.cyrusshroff.com
Email: shroffcyrus@gmail.com