The Thousands

Hitesh Natalwala is a complicated guy. His art is intricate, with detailed textures painted, drawn and collaged onto the surfaces of the works. His appropriations and abstractions play around with history, and personal and cultural identity. He’s also a fan of the highly unpackable title. There are vintagey-print, collaged, unheimlich-vibed party-tableaux, with the potential to kind of make you uncomfortable given a narrative power up by their being named after predatory animals. Natalwala’s unsettling weirdness can be fairly literal, too, with a series of human-animal-nature-machine morphic drawings entitled ‘Changers’ also being part of this body of work, alongside pictures of flowers called by their real names but painted to look like cross-stitch samplers on a surface of old newspaper.

Other pieces on show here, like ‘Heads shoulders knees and toe’ and ‘The segmented view’, are coterminous visual and titular puns of the kind that make you say “Huh?” and then “Ha!” – and then think about how many ways there are to look at objects for a while (cough cough Picasso exhibition go see it cough). There’s also some of the most luscious scrap/confetti looking compositions pretty much ever, and these are also called by true but consideration-demanding names, ingenuous ones like ‘big blue thing’ and ‘green thing well hung’.

It may also be worth nothing that Kamikaze Wasabi is not this guy’s first condiment reference in the title of a show: he called a 2009 solo in Mumbai The lack of marmalade was my only real grievance. We are onto you, Hitesh Natalwala! But it’s okay because you yourself are really onto something good.