Nek Chand Saini was an Indian artist and innovator who built the Rock Garden of Chandigarh in India. He constructed sculptures by upcycling waste materials such as old bottles, bottle tops, plates, cups, electrical goods, old pipes, tiles, bangles (bracelets), bicycle mudguards and so on... | His art style is called, ‘Outsider Art’. This style refers to artists who have received no formal training, yet show talent and artistic insight. His ‘real’ job was a Road Inspector in Chandigarh. “I started building this garden as a hobby,” he said in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “I had many ideas, I was thinking all the time. I saw beauty and art in what people said was junk.” (The New York Times, June 2015). |
Nek Chand’s Rock Garden is a forty-acre ‘sculpture garden’ in the city and is a famous tourist attraction, visited by over a million people each year.