The World in a Garden: Nek Chand

Nek Chand began work on what became the Rock Garden in 1958, while employed as a roads inspector on the building of Chandigarh. He gathered stones and rubble from the villages cleared for the new city and, working in secret on government land, slowly filled a hidden site with thousands of concrete figures, winding paths and enclosures.

This exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, home to the largest body of Chand’s work outside India, drew on nearly two hundred works from its collection and set them alongside Iain Jackson’s survey drawings, site panoramas and a catalogue of every rock and sculpture installed in the garden. The gallery itself was shaped as a landscape of terraces, enclosures and vistas, so that visitors moved through the work as through a promenade, and could see how closely the figures belong to the terrain of the garden.