(Untitled) Blue Lady

Navjot's Untitled
(Untitled) The Blue Lady Sculpture
Artist	Navjot Altaf
Medium	carved teakwood, metal, and indigo

Untitled, more commonly referred to as The Blue Lady, 1999–2002, is a carved teakwood, metal, and indigo sculpture by Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf.^[1][2] The artwork represents a goddess of fertility and is painted bright blue, a traditional Hindu colour symbolizing divinity.^[3] The larger than life sculpture is also an illustration of the "challenges faced by women who try to claim recognition for their knowledge in parts of India."^[1] This contemporary South Asian work can be seen in the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery of The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Notably, the sculpture is listed as one of the ROM's iconic treasures^[3] and has been considered to be one of the most important pieces in the museum's collection of South Asian art.^[4]

In 2003, (Untitled) The Blue Lady was exhibited at Talwar Gallery in New York City, which currently represents Altaf, in her first solo exhibition in the United States entitled In Response To.... The sculpture was installed alongside other human figures, similar in their monumental scale and brilliant indigo color, in what was an almost theatre-like setting; together, the solid, confident female figures became iconic presences, whose insistent physicality worked to "subvert...the narrative of patriarchal dominance and transcending the modes of art practices."^[5] The exhibition was instrumental in illuminating the gender-based concerns of Altaf's work, which questions the accepted language of eroticism, sexuality, and domesticity through the creation of figures, like (Untitled) The Blue Lady, of anomalous femininity.