JCAM, Vol.3, No.2
Ashok Kumar Gopalan JCAM: The Indian artist Ashok Kumar Gopalan was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2008, and a Kerala Lalithakala Akademi award winner in 2007. Mr. Gopolan earned an M.F.A in Graphic Art from Kala-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal in 2001. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Painting, in Govt. R RCFA, Mavelikara, Kerala in 1998. Ashok Kumar Gopalan has numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout India and participated in nearly a dozen art camps in the past decade. For this article JCAM staff asked Mr. Gopolan to describe his background and artistic practice. Below is his response in its entirety.
AKG: “Born in a rural hamlet of Kerala, the southern most Indian state, I have been pursuing art professionally for the past 18 years. Over these years, I have been trying to fine-tune my modes of expression through experience, observation and execution. The landscapes of the mind with its essential reflections of the outside world have carved out a new idiom in the totality of my artistic oeuvre, throwing up fresh challenges and avenues to explore their alternatives vis-a-vis modernity. The pursuit of the global subject from the local platform has been a defining characteristic trait of my professional profile which involves continuous dialogue between the contesting spaces of the past and the present; the interface of which has invariably lent refreshingly new and high quality perspectives to my art. As an artist, l draw my energy from my specific locale. The spectrum of social ambience, flora and fauna, local philosophy, rustic wisdom, cuisine, social criticism bordering on a strident sarcasm. Kerala's regionalism, dialects, extinct species, geographical peculiarities, profound anxieties and deep sighs, all these determine the trajectory of my work. A complex linear interplay of this phantasmagoria provide the ideal sounding board for
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