PAINTED BENCHES, artefacts, lamps chairs, tables, ice boxes, kettles, cabinets, wardrobes and many such bright painted objects are what you are likely to discover at Artquest, an art-cum-furniture gallery owned by Meher Bijlani and located in an old colonial building in the leafy bylanes of Colaba. Their bright colours, fascinating street-side imagery and their innovative designs is what draws you to Artquest, again and again.

Meher and her husband Hiru are well known in Mumbai art circles as avid collectors. So when she set up the gallery to provide Mumbai’s art lovers and connoissurs a place from where they could source affordable art, no one was surprised. What threw them off guard was her decision to incorporate painted furniture, artefacts and lamps in her quaint art store.

“It began when one day I impulsively bought an old kettle which had a very graceful shape. I did not know what to do with it. So I asked an artist to paint it and I liked the result,” she says. She got a few of her artist friends, whom she has patronised over the years, to paint a couple of things like trays, coconut scrapers, bread bins, jars, bed and breakfast trays, which sold quite well.

A design magazine approached Bijlani to do a kitchen art show for them, which was held at Indigo, a popular restaurant in Mumbai. Artquest got artists like Prashant Hirlekar and Meera Devidayal to paint everything from a fridge to food covers, trays, jugs, cutlery boards, kettles, old style chullahs, dish racks, toasters and even matkas. The show, needless to say, was a complete sellout.

Since then, Artquest has begun stocking painted furniture, kitchen and interiors accessories. Besides this, the gallery has also participated in the last two Kala Ghoda Art Festivals. In the 2002 fetival, they did a series of street furniture, which doubled up as furniture one could use in the house. “So a golawala’s gadi (the cart used by golawalla in Mumbai) was painted and turned into the bottom of a table, the painted post box became a laundry box, a roadside barber table, when painted turned into a computer table. We were surprised these pieces are bought by people who had huge farmhouses.”

The stuff on sale at Artquest is quite kitscy and drwas its imagery from different works of art, from nature, from folk icons, from pop iconography and from life itself. “We sometimes work on themes like our man-woman series, musical instruments series and so on,” says Bijlani.

THE PRICE OF EACH piece of furniture depends on the artist who has painted it; the more noted the artist, the higher the price. So you can buy a painted bench for Rs. 12,000 as well as for Rs.30,000.

Bijlani collects old pieces of furniture / objects, which are then cleaned, restored & painted by artists. The result is a stunningly beautiful recycled one of a kind piece of Art Furniture / object. most of these pieces are functional.