Mapping with Figures

Mapping with Figures: The Evolving Art of

KS RADHAKRISHNAN

R SIVA KUMAR

“With the Musui-Maiya sculptures Radhakrishnan frees himself from the visible trappings of modernism he had adopted in his earlier work. He does not privilege the fragment anymore, nor does he employ the surface chopping analytical veneer of postcubist sculpture, he also gives up the idea of each sculpture being an independent art object and embraces seriality and narration.

With the highly readable figuration they might even look a little regressive. But this is deceptive. Though the visible trappings of modernism have been shed, his work still carries a vein of modernism deep within it. These anatomically complete figures, as we have already noticed, were born of a fragment—the lopped off head of Musui.

And the body that is so readable is at the same time schematic, and too light and nimble to be real. The arms and legs are not only lean but also almost of the same girth.

The figures (especially from the Freehold and Terrafly series) are so plastic, and their movements are so fluid, that they deny the reality of bones; and the sensuous fleshinvoking modelling is stretched thin like skin over the meagre volume of the figures...”

R Siva Kumar’s informative essay on the sculptural journey of KS Radhakrishnan is an art historical gem useful for the serious lovers of art. Mapping with Figures is a highly focussed study on the artist’s works from the last fifteen years which offers an insightful account on the significance of KS Radhakrishnan in contemporary Indian art.

It restores a sense of history, complemented with a fascinating background check on the formations of Radhakrishnan as an artist.

Mapping with Figures: The Evolving Art of

KS RADHAKRISHNAN

Curated by

R SIvA KumAR

in association with Mapin Publishing

First published in India 2015 by Akar Prakar In collaboration with National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Bengaluru In association with Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd

Text © Prof. R Siva Kumar

In conjunction with the exhibition, ‘mapping with Figures’: The Evolving Art of KS Radhakrishnan, curated by Prof. R Siva Kumar, organized by the Director, the NGmA Bengaluru, Dr. Sathyabhama Badhreenath in November, 2015.

Printed in India at Iris Printers, Kolkata

Photographs and Sculptures © KS Radhakrishnan Copyright of all the works reproduced rest with collectors/collections

Editorial support: Abhijit Lath and Akar Prakar team Photography

Prabuddha Dasgupta Gireesh Gv Pradeep Dasgupta Samiran Nandy Desh Kalyan Choudhury Nasir Ali mamun Atul Kasbekar Siddharth Sivakumar KS Radhakrishnan

Curator

Prof. R Siva Kumar

Text Editor

Dr. Sonal Parmar

Design

Shaiju Augustine

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Captions: Front Cover & Back Cover: The Ramp (2004), Bronze (Detail) Photograph: Prabuddha Dasgupta Front endpaper & back endpaper: The Ramp (2004), Bronze (Detail) Photograph: Prabuddha Dasgupta National Gallery of Modern Art #49 manikyavelu mansion, Palace Road, Bengaluru - 560052 Telephone: +91 080 22342338 Tele Fax: +91 080 22201027 e-mail: ngma.bengaluru@gmail.com website: www.ngmaindia.gov.in/ngma_bangaluru.asp Akar Prakar P 238 Hindustan Park, Kolkata 700 029 Tel: 033 24642617, 0141 2292705 E-mail: info@akarprakar.com www.akarprakar.com

ISBN: 978-93-85360-14-5 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-71-0 (Grantha) LCCN: 2015956085

Contents Note from Akar Prakar

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Foreword by Director, NGMA, Bengaluru

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Mapping the world with Human Figure by R Siva Kumar

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Plates Biographical Profile

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KS Radhakrishnan at Studio, Chattarpur, New Delhi

Note from Akar Prakar Relationships and friendships take time to mature; years pass by as the association consolidates into an intense and passionate bonding. We have such an intense and passionate relationship with this prominent sculptor called Radhakrishnan. Our relationship with KS Radhakrishnan as a sculptor goes back several years, when we had just begun our gallery. His exuding warmth and openness touched us and moreover we were impressed by his sculptural imagination and his body of works. Thus, we began our professional collaboration between him and the gallery since 2005.

To unravel certain personal details of this relationship would be relevant for the viewers to understand the light hearted, witty, and lively persona of this artist. It is always fun to be around him,

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to listen to his well measured humorous remarks and not to miss his astute puns. Radhakrishnan’s passion and devotion towards his work is impeccable, he is completely lost in the moment of creation while working, capturing the essence of the now in his sculptures.

Radhakrishnan’s sculptural oeuvre is marked by its lucidity and fluidity, its frequent references to performance traditions, its playful nature compounded by humour, further and foremost his association with bronze as a medium to recast the existing sculptural parlance. He conveys the simple emotions such as Mudita (joy), Maitri (loving kindness), Karuna (compassion), Upeksha (equanimity) which are different aspects of universal feelings of love which unite fellow men and that is why his work is loved by so many collectors and art lovers across the globe.

It is with great delight that we present this body of work by KS Radhakrishnan at the National Gallery of Modern Art Bengaluru which he has created over the last 15 years.

It has always been a pleasure to work with KS Radhakrishnan whom we lovingly call ‘Radhada’. I am sure that the publication will give you an insight into the world of KS Radhakrishnan as a sculptor.

I am grateful to R Siva Kumar for writing, as usual, an insightful text on KS Radhakrishnan, to Dr. Sathyabhama Badhreenath and her team at NGMA Bengaluru, to Bipin Shah at Mapin, to the Akar Prakar team, Mr. Amit Batra at GE, SG Vasudev for their support and to Visa Card for sponsoring this wonderful publication with which we can reach out to lovers of art globally.

Reena & Abhijit Lath, Director, Akar Prakar

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Foreword by Director, NGMA, Bengaluru National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, Ministry of Culture, Government of India in collaboration with Akar Prakar, a contemporary Art Gallery based in Kolkata, is proud to present a prestigious sculpture exhibition titled ‘Mapping with Figures’: The Evolving Art of KS Radhakrishnan’ curated by renowned art historian R Siva Kumar, is open to artists, art lovers and the general public at large.

KS Radhakrishnan belongs to the generation of sculptors who emerged on the Indian art scene in the early eighties, and were instrumental in bringing about a new energy and focus into sculpture. He is one of the notable among the new generation of sculptors who has successfully brought about a definitive resurgence in Indian sculpture. He is a renowned contemporary sculptor, literated from Visva Bharati University Santiniketan, who, with his sensual bronze sculptures, imprints on the world of art as a modernist. His career began with an aesthetic schism.

As a young man he had journeyed from a village in Kottayam to Santiniketan to pursue painting. He instead discovered sculpture and Ramkinkar Baij.

As a student he had on the one hand a teacher like Sarbari Roy Choudhury - who himself belonged to the figurative mode of early modernist sculpture as a portraitist and to its subsequent phase of fragmentation as figural sculptor -and an exemplar like Ramkinkar whose large outdoor sculptures stood out as examples of a more triumphant earlier moment in figural sculptural expression.

Through a myriad of shows, his art has encompassed varied cities both in India and other countries.

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Like many of his contemporaries he is a figurative sculptor, but his preference for modeling and bronze casting over a new material sets him apart. A modernist he recharges age old sculptural process with a new sensibility. His work, at once both intimate and universal, takes the celebration of sensuality as one of its central themes.

The exhibition will explore the trajectory of KS Radhakrishnan’s work from the late 1990s to the present through a selection of about 50 works representing the entire gamut of his oeuvre in kind and scale. His work today combines aspects of object materiality of the medium with figural sensuousness and narrative nuances.

I take this opportunity to express my gratitude whole heartedly to the Curator of the exhibition Shri. R Siva Kumar, Ms. Reena Lath, CEO of Akar Prakar Art, Kolkata for their support in bringing this exhibition to Bengaluru. My sincere acknowledgement to Shri. Sudhakar Rao, Chairman, Advisory Committee, NGMA, Bengaluru and all the members of the NGMA Advisory Committee for their unstinted support.

I am indebted to the Ministry of Culture for reposing faith in me in undertaking this onerous responsibility and I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at NGMA, Bengaluru for their sincere efforts in arranging this exhibition.

Dr. Sathyabhama Badhreenath Director, NGMA Bengaluru

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At Studio, Santiniketan 2014

Mapping the World with the Human Figure An artist’s career is a journey undertaken with a vague sense of destination. It is a journey into the unknown, made on the strength of one’s passion and one’s skills of negotiation, its destination remaining something of a mystery till the end. Therefore it would only be commonsensical to be patient and read an artist’s career retrospectively when the time comes. But this denies the adventure and delight of speculative reading that an unfinished career promises, taking away from us the prospect of becoming a fellow traveller who both follows as well as thinks in anticipation of the movements the artist could make.

Thus, while art historians have generally voted for patience, critics have preferred the excitement of engaging with the evolving artist in a jugalbandi, and in sharing the exhilaration of growth. In this context, it may be pertinent to note that art historical studies of past masters have broadly revealed a pattern of progress in three

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Working at Studio, Santiniketan

stages: an initial stage of learning with debts to traditions within which the artist works; a period of self-assertion, innovation and self-finding; and a final late phase in which the artist frees himself from the logic of evolution which he helps to create. An artist’s mid-career is therefore a point in the trajectory where he stands poised between his sources and his destiny—a point from where we can see where he is coming from and what he is bringing onto the scene: from where we can recognize who he is, and speculate where he might be heading.

The National Gallery of Modern Art (at Delhi and Bangalore) has during the last two years organized a number of exhibitions of artists in their mid-careers—Atul Dodiya, Soni Taraporewala, Subodh Gupta, V. Ramesh and the Raqs Media Collective—who have marked their arrival with a body of work that has written itself into our art scene. They are artists who have stepped into the Indian art space during the decade between the early eighties and the early nineties and have proven that they are here to stay.

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Maiya is both Arrow and Bow (2011), Bronze, 274 x 274 cm [uttarayan Complex, Santiniketan]

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KS Radhakrishnan is another such artist and this exhibition of his sculptures at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore is the latest in that series.

KS Radhakrishnan with Ramkinkar Baij while working on the portrait at Santiniketan, 1979

Radhakrishnan completed his master’s in sculpture from Santiniketan in 1981, and that makes him a contemporary of Ravinder Reddy and Druva Mistry who completed their master’s about the same time from Baroda. Together they represent the beginning of a resurgent and more expansive phase of modern Indian sculpture. Their sensibilities are distinct and while their works do not resemble each other, each brings the human figure into focus and induces a new imagination into the practice of sculpture. Their early work had something to do with the schools they were trained in. While engagements with Pop Art during the late sixties and the emergent narrative practices that was gathering strength among the Baroda artists in the late seventies had a definitive impact on the early works of Druva Mistry and

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Ravinder Reddy, the early work of Radhakrishnan was shaped by the divergent modernisms of Ramkinkar Baij and Sarbari Roy Choudhury, his mentors at Santiniketan.

KS Radhakrishnan with Prof. Sarbari Roy Choudhury, 2006

Yet, right from the initial years their works belonged together, not because they were similar or because they had similar ideas of sculpture, but because each of them brought the human figure back into focus and induced a new imagination around it. Perhaps, because of its association with colonial and academic practices, the human body as an organic whole was seldom explored by Indian sculptors post-forties. It was subjected to distortion, fragmentation, formalist simplification and abstraction by a host of post-independence artists. They seemed to believe that there was no space for the body as an indivisible whole in modern art.

These three sculptors brought back a celebration of this living, aching, exulting body through which we live and experience the world onto the centre stage of Indian sculpture.

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Although both of Radhakrishnan’s mentors were modernist figurative sculptors, they had different ways of approaching the issue. For Ramkinkar the human body was defined by the tribal inhabitants living around him; with a natural empathy he visualized them monumentally and took every opportunity to valorise them.

To him they belonged to the earth, grew out of it and stood large like the trees, and he fashioned his monumental outdoor sculptures using the laterite pebbles gathered from the local terrain. Sarbari, on the other hand, used his nimble fingers to shape clay into throbbing flesh and cast it in bronze. His modelled figures were small enough to be shaped and contained within the space of his palms. He dreamt of monumentality and invoked it suggestively, while his sculptures remained physically small, even miniscule.

To make that dream visible he placed them on the pedestal and photographed them from below, against the sky.

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Ramkinkar Baij: Harvester (1943), Concrete, Kala Bhavana Complex, Santiniketan

Sarbari Roy Choudhury: Reclining Woman (1982), Stone, 32 x 17 x 12.5 cm

Thus, to be truly understood, the work of Ramkinkar has to seen as belonging to the earth, and that of Sarbari has to be seen against the sky of one’s own imagination and of the world. Radhakrishnan’s effort, it appears in retrospect, was to do sculptures that bring about a union between the earth and the sky. I do not think he has consciously thought of it that way. But that is not surprising, nor is it untrue. Our deepest thoughts are not always worked out consciously, they often rise to the surface and manifest through us, sometimes even without our being/becoming aware of them, at least at the moment of happening.

This exhibition revolves around his work post mid-nineties. It is not an arbitrary date —it marks the point when Radhakrishnan, having paid his debts to his mentors and other modernist legacies, begins a period of self-assertion, of self-finding. However, I would like to begin by looking back at his very first sculpture that has survived.

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Called the Mother Torso it dates back to 1975, which is either the latter half of his first year in Santiniketan or the beginning of the second. Now I can’t remember which, but it was part of a series of woodcut prints and sculptures in which he had explored the theme of the female torso. But, as his classmate, I do remember that it was one of the first sculptures he did. The name was given later and is emblematic of its place at the head of his sculptural oeuvre, as a kind of source figure.

Mother Torso (1975), Concrete, 46 x 30 cm

The Mother Torso is not a large sculpture: it is only afoot and half in height, but it invokes monumentality far beyond its size.

These features, along with its unmistakable sensuality, connects it with Sarbari, in whose work the torso is a recurring theme.

Yet at the same time, its body formed of interlocked geometric units and well demarcated volumes points to Ramkinkar. While the form, irrespective of its being a torso or a full figure, invokes an organic wholeness in Sarbari’s work, the figure in Ramkinkar’s

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work is complete and sensuously rendered only in his monumental sculptures; in his smaller sculptures, especially in the later ones, the body is usually fragmented and slashed up. This early work of Radhakrishnan is a marriage of these divergent features.

The Mother Torso also represents Radhakrishnan’s early endeavour to embed himself within the larger practice of modernist sculpture. The torso as a synecdoche of the human body has been a particularly prominent modernist trope. Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, Moore, Maillol, Lehmbruck, Lipchitz, Zadkine, Archipenco, Giacometti, Jean Arp, and Julio Gonzalez have all sculpted torsos, albeit for different reasons. To some the figure with its head and limbs looped off presented the essential core of our bodies, to others it represented the meaty middle slice of our existence, or the prime site of our desire, for yet others the fragmented body was a symbol of our embattled time and of modernity. Whatever the perspective, for all of them the fragmented body also emblematized artistic freedom —the freedom to turn everything, including this body of ours with which we empathize most readily, into a site of art: into a field where an artist’s freedom and an artist’s power to reshape and remake everything could be emphatically demonstrated.

The figure as fragmented body and sculpture as object characterized much of Radhakrishnan’s student work at Santiniketan. Towards the end of that period he began to graft the figure as organic fragments onto geometric structures and turn his sculptures into assemblages of bodies in performative spaces. They were more like an architect’s drawings waiting to be enlarged and given their true monumentality than like sculptures conceived on a small scale. And as opportunities arose in the mid-1980s some of the early works, beginning with the Mother Torso, were enlarged to

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a truly monumental scale. Concurrently, his new works began to grow in scale and move into open spaces.

Performing Forms - 1 (1981), Aluminium, 45 x 45 cm

Radhakrishnan often photographed these works against open vistas and vast skies—as Moore and Sarbari did with their works— to express his desire for creating larger sculptures, and to make us recognize their autonomous nature as art objects. But judging by their materiality and scale, we realize that they were not meant to be measured against nature or open landscapes, but against built environment and the viewer. Measuring between four and five feet in height, they held themselves against the setting without dwarfing the viewer. And their sculpted materiality negotiated

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Whirlwind (1990), Bronze, 109 x 86 cm

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between the geometricity of the buildings amidst which they were usually placed for viewing and the organic, corporeal bodies of their viewers.

By the early nineties the limbs and head were restored and, anatomically, the figures became more complete; gradually, freed from cubist geometricity, they became more organic. They now stopped negotiating between a preconceived setting, regulated by geometry and their viewers, and began to address the viewers more directly, not as objects but as figures, as other human bodies.

As a part of this, the pedestals were either shrunk—reduced to a mere technical necessity for stabilizing the figures and made to appear like anamorphous undulation of the ground on which they stood—or were integrated, when they were more substantial, with the location and used as instruments for immersing the figure into the setting in which they got housed. In his more recent works, which are on view in this exhibition, Radhakrishnan has further

The Pull (1994), Bronze, 175 x 184 cm

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worked on the relation between the figure and its base and made it more subtle.

But the most important change that happened was with the figure itself —with the way in which it was conceived and modelled.

This begins, almost abruptly, around 1997 with a group of figure sculptures with full anatomical wholeness and portrait like recognizable features. The group revolves around two characters named Musui and Maiya. They are the Adam and Eve of his sculptural universe, archetypal figures from whom a whole species has descended. They are still with him and this exhibition revolves around the meandering journeys through the world Radhakrishnan has had with them.

Musui was the name of a young Santal boy who used to occasionally model for Radhakrishnan while he was a student at Santiniketan, and with whom he had become friendly. Musui had a supple body,

Musui Maiya Series (2000), Bronze

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strong yet so malleable, a body that hid its own rigour under a semblance of slackness; and a smile that hovered tantalisingly between sublimity and idiocy. Radhakrishnan had done a figure study of Musui, which was too large to be carried when he left Santiniketan. So he decapitated the sculpture and carried the head with him when he shifted to Delhi after his studies. Fifteen years later, Musui was brought back to life, body and all, from this fragment of a head. In this artist’s act of recreation, the body, which is usually the sign of gross materiality—of mass, volume and weight, and of such proofs of belonging to this world—was entirely reimagined as light and nimble and an image of the mind’s freedom and impertinence. Like God, from the rib of Musui he created Maiya, because he knew that without both man and woman the world cannot be mapped, the earth and the sky cannot be measured. Maiya, born of Musui’s rib so to speak, was not his mirror image but a companion who complimented him.

Musui Maiya (1999), Bronze (Detail)

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Maiya as Graduate (1998), Bronze, 175 x 76 cm

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Maiya as an Arrow (1998), Bronze, 111 x 114 cm

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Musui Maiya Series (2000), Bronze

The two of them are not only different but also multiple, and between them they hold the potentiality to become all of us every man and every woman. When Musui is the devil, Maiya becomes the angel; when he is the dancer she becomes the writer who hovers in the air and writes on the ground; when he is the witty Mullah she becomes the learned graduate; and when he is the Buddha she becomes the yakshi. Their bodies are natural and graceful and together they frolic and dance, mock our sense of singularity and enact the ever changing play of life— a play, that the wise tell us has to be light and delightful like play itself, and ever surprising rather than eternally ordered. There is no end to the theatre of life, and with Musui and Maiya becoming his constant travelling companions in all peregrinations through the world, this idea too has spilled into his later work.

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Musui Walking with a Palm Leaf (2009), Bronze, 156 x 83 cm

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Maiya Walking with a Boat (2009), Bronze, 157.5 x 81 cm

Particular and yet archetypal, like the characters in R. K. Narayan’s novels, Musui and Maiya are both real and imagined. Like his characters, they combine simplicity and earthiness with the subtleties of wit and grace, and tell stories that are both located and universal. Both Narayan and Radhakrishnan recollect a past world even as they are telling stories to us in this one, and they do this without warning, without making a distinction between them. And as they do so, the flow of time is surreptitiously slipped into these stories. The boat, the hand fan, the lantern, the little tile-roofed shelters that Musui and Maiya carry in several of his later sculptures, or that are used as standalone objects or bases in some of the smaller works, point to memories of a past spent by the sculptor in Kerala, a Kerala that lives on in the memory of migrants like him, but is disappearing from the landscape and from the minds of the people who continue to live there.

Musui as Jesus Christ (2000), Bronze (Detail)

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With the Musui-Maiya sculptures Radhakrishnan frees himself from the visible trappings of modernism he had adopted in his earlier work. He does not privilege the fragment anymore, nor does he employ the surface chopping analytical veneer of postcubist sculpture. He also gives up the idea of each sculpture being an independent art object and embraces seriality and narration.

With the highly readable figuration they might even look a little regressive. But this is deceptive. Although he has shed the visible trappings of modernism, his work still carries a vein of modernism deep within it. These anatomically complete figures, as we have already noticed, were born of a fragment—the lopped off head of Musui. And the body that is so readable is at the same time schematic and too light and nimble to be real. The arms and legs are not only lean but also almost of the same girth. The figures (especially from the Freehold and Terrafly series) are so plastic and their movements are so fluid that they deny the reality of bones; and the sensuous flesh-invoking modelling is now stretched thin like skin over the meagre volume of the figures.

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Maiya as Terrafly (2010) Bronze, 228 x 72 cm

Musui as Terrafly (2006), Bronze, 365.5 x 91.5 x 106.5 cm 29

KS Radhakrishnan is a leading contemporary sculptor of national and international acclaim whose sculptures are exclusively executed in the medium of bronze. His intervention in the revival of figurative tradition in Indian sculptural parlance with an emphasis on the body has been acknowledged as a significant art historical milestone. Trained under the supervision of two important modernists Ramkinkar Baij and Sarbari Roy Choudhury, Radhakrishnan has developed an inimitable style which emphasise on fluid, dynamic, extra-ordinary body types using two characters Musui and Maiya. His works have been displayed in Triennalle India (1990), Hippodrome d’elongchamp, Paris (1996); Espace Michel Simon-Noisy le grand, France (1996), Beijing Biennale (2012).

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

Mapping with Figures

The Evolving Art of KS Radhakrishnan R Sivakumar 112 pages, 74 colour illustrations, 26 b&w photographs 8 x 10” (202 x 252 mm), hc ISBN: 978-93-85360-14-5 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-71-0 (Grantha) ₹1950 | $39.50 | £26 2016 • World rights

R Siva Kumar, one of the foremost art historians in India, is professor in History of Art at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. He is responsible for charting out a seminal scholarship on the modernist interventions of artists from Santiniketan.

His significant contribution to Indian art was heralded with his monograph Santiniketan: The Making of A Contextual Modernism (1997) which was followed by extensive studies and curatorial manuscripts on prominent Indian artists including Rabindranath Tagore, K.G. Subramanyan, Benodebehari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij and others. His significant publications include The Santiniketan Murals, 1995; K.G. Subramanyan: A Retrospective, 2003; The Paintings of Gaganedranath, 2015; and The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, 2011.

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