PROGRESSIVE ARTISTS' GROUP

Versatility has fallen out of fashion in a market that rewards the recognizable signature above almost everything else. An artist who paints, draws, and sculpts in equal measure is, by the logic of most galleries, a harder artist to sell. Vikash Kalra's solo show at Artix 5.0 argues, quietly but persistently, that this logic has it backwards, that the old idea of the artist as someone equally at home with a brush, a pencil, or a welding torch is not a failure of focus but a return to something painting alone rarely allows.

The paintings, where the show properly begins, carry an evident debt to the primitivist strain running through Indian modernism. Kalra's heads, dark-grounded and built from paint that appears dragged as much as brushed, have little interest in likeness, and that absence reads as a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. A portrait that flatters is decoration; one that unsettles has the courage of an opinion, and these heads have exactly that.

It is in the drawings that Kalra feels most unguarded. Cross-hatched, urgent, unconcerned with the polish that smooths so much contemporary work on paper, they read as private notation, a mind still arguing with itself. One sheet, a doubled or overlapping face rendered with nervous, insistent energy, calls to mind the anxious line of Egon Schiele, and does more with a few inches of paper than many artists manage with a full canvas.

The sculpture may be the show's real surprise. The steel piece, angular and improbably balanced, has an aggression that suits the material honestly rather than merely showing it off. The bronze, a dark, horned, mask-like head, is the strongest single object in the room, carrying a weight, literal and otherwise, that gives the whole show its center of gravity. It would hold its own in far grander company than a hotel salon in Delhi.

The format suits the work well. Hotel corridors turned temporary gallery offer an intimacy that conventional fairs rarely manage, letting five mediums sit together in a single room without competing for space or attention. Kalra's range across five mediums is the argument the show makes for itself, and it is a persuasive one. A single artist, speaking fluently in paint, graphite, steel, and bronze, in one room, is not something most fairs, hotel-based or otherwise, manage to offer.