Kumi by Kunel Gaur

The visual communication landscape of our streets is a vibrant tapestry that reflects the essence and culture of a city. It is where culture is built. The Kumi series serve as a response to this captivating environment. Inspired by Japanese graphic culture and Anime, the portrait series explores the interplay of neo-futurism, brutalism, functional design, and symbolism that is fused with typographic signifiers found in signage systems, and hardware to generate a technical aesthetic that celebrates the ever-evolving urban landscape.

The body of work merges these visual elements with architectural material like wood, metal steel, toughened glass, polycarbonate acrylic and vinyl adding a layer of visual complexity and depth to them.

The character set is based on a few pieces designed after my first visit to Japan a few years back. It was the last country I visited before the pandemic of 2020. While in lockdown, I began exploring the characters further to produce a series of bricolages that were part of my solo show in Mumbai in 2021.

During and after the show, Kumi’s have been in constant evolution. The first show led to a slew of commissions from collectors. The commissioned pieces utilise information from the collectors’ life and nuances adding personal meaning to the artwork.

Kunel Gaur is a creative director/designer whose personal visual style is inspired by functional design and brutalist architecture and design movement that emerged in the 1950s and has come to evolve as a response to the overwhelming use of embellishment on visual communication both online and offline.

Kunel’s creative process feeds on channeled thoughts or ideas and found sensibilities. Looking at reconstruction and appropriation as means to create a sensory overlap and extract new meaning, he creates a variety of assemblages from the material around him. He builds using architectural material like wood, concrete, resin, metal, acrylic paint, screen printing techniques, glass and electricals amongst other such. He often mixes his work with the written word, flirting with what could be called prose, poetry or at once both.

As a creative entrepreneur, Kunel’s initiatives have been featured on platforms like London Design Festival, Jerusalem Design Week, and TEDx. As an artist, his work has been discussed on Hypebeast, Icographica, Vogue, Bored Panda, Picame, Fubiz amongst others.