Rhett D'COSTA (AU)

 

14 - 28 July 2018

Opening: Saturday 14 July 5-7pm

Hours: Thur to Sat, 1pm- 6pm

 

Hidden Space is delighted to present Secret Interiors, Rhett D’Costa’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Secret Interiors explores architectural space and colour, drawing on D’Costa’s experiences of Moghul painting and architecture*. 

 

D’Costa first saw Indian miniature paintings in person, in India, nearly 30 years ago. It was the first time he had returned to India, 15 years after his migration to Australia as a child. He noticed how the use of colour was very different from his recent colour explorations during his Western-centric art school experience in Australia. He excitedly wrote lists of colour combinations. 

 

Fast forward to to 2018 and D’Costa finds these decades old notes about colour. It sent him back to re-looking at Moghul paintings and the numerous Moghul forts and palaces in India which he has visited since that first return journey. 

 

Secret Interiors attempts to reactivate these experiences across time and space. The show concentrates on the gesture and atmosphere these spaces and colour combinations create, with their deeply embedded sense of the richness of court life, social divisions across gender and power structures, and the engagement with poetry, geometry, cosmology and culture. A further layering takes place in the use of the internal architecture of the Hidden Space site and the present experience of Hong Kong, where D’Costa has been a regular visitor since 2008. 

 

* Moghal art and architecture is a characteristic Indo-Islamic-Persian style that flourished on the Indian subcontinent during the Moghal empire (1526–1857)