Ellipsis
2018–2020
Mixed media on linen
108 × 720 in. / 274 × 1829 cm. (in 12 parts)
Installation view, Famous Studio, Mumbai

Ellipsis is an expansive twelve-part polyptych in which images hovering between abstraction and the barely recognisable unfold across an extended pictorial field.

Art historian Chaitanya Sambrani writes: “Ellipsis brings together many of his ongoing concerns at architectural scale, becoming a kind of hyper-enlarged and extended graphic diary where the artist lingers on the spaces between utterances in a state of fevered reverie.”

The seating within the gallery space is altered by Kallat to assume the form of the two hands of the Doomsday Clock. Maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947, the Clock uses a countdown to midnight to signal threats of global catastrophe. In 2019, when the Clock stood at “two minutes to midnight,” this symbolic seating formed a site for viewing and encounter, placing the painting within a heightened temporal register of planetary peril.