wo artists, one from London and the other from Australia, who otherwise work with nudes, clothed their creations, adhering to the conventional Indian modesty, to showcase them at the recent India Art Fair. These works were undoubtedly the centre pieces at the show, vying for attention with the iconic pieces from Raza's Bindu and Husain's horse series.

Sam Jinks from Australia belongs to a small group of artists in the world who makes 'hyperreal' sculptures of the human body. Hyperrealism is a recent development in both sculpture and painting and is aligned with developments in colour and digital photography. He uses contemporary industrial materials like silicone, resin, and latex to produce a series of lifelike figures.

The artist focused on flawed, 'everyday' bodies, shrunken to ¾ size, rather than heroic, idealised figures. "There is a sincere and profound sense of vulnerability in my works, particularly in my depiction of the very old (Woman and Child 2010) and very young (Baby 2006). Hence they are slightly smaller than human size, which encourages in the viewer a sense of intimacy or association with the artwork. These invite meditative contemplation," explained Jinks.

Jinks developed his technical skills in advertising where he created 'lots of dead bodies' for commercial clients. That, perhaps, helped him replicate the human body with extraordinary precision. Unlike wax museum pieces, he makes the skin look like skin, which is luminous and penetrated by light – you can almost see the pores, follicles, eye colour, fingernails, toenails and even individual strands of hair. Every sculpture is handmade and price begins at US$ 35,000.

In Woman and Child, for example, the loose and pink skin of the infant looked exquisite against the translucent and slightly greyish skin of the old woman. The artist says that this work coincided with an emotionally stressful period in his life. "At the time, my grandmother was dying and my son was born...so the work came from a particular experience; I was trying to process all of it."

Woman and Child by Sam Jinks

A lot different from Jinks' life-like sculpture is Jeffrey Robb's 3D images. This London-based artist presented a series of visually stunning and highly original 3D images of women trapped in hexagonal cubes. I heard fashion designer J.J. Valaya exclaiming, "Will someone set them free? They are real, aren't they?"

Robb uses holography, lenticular photography and laser light to create such images with an illusion of depth, and have the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles. "I've clothed them, for the sake of modesty, as I am showing in India. Otherwise, I specialise in nudes. This series is shot underwater at Pinewood Studios (world's only underwater film studio), London, where scenes from Harry Potter and James Bond were shot. These body shapes are impossible to achieve as they defy gravity," says Robb, a Darwin scholar from the Royal College of Art, London.

Priced at Rs 11 lakh, his figures appear to float like feather in space. And of course, as these are holograms, the body also moves. It does so like our eye, slowly, so the three-dimensional form of each model reveals itself gradually, sensuously. Robb is best known for his 3D photography of Queen Elizabeth II and his abstract landscape hologram is displayed at Victoria and Albert Museum.