Art of Ramachandran

A. Ramachandran is one of India’s most distinguished and prolific artists who has ceaselessly experimented with visual language for more than four decades. His art is uniquely both contemporary and Indian in essence. Painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and art educationist, Ramachandran has explored diverse mediums and scales with a dynamic personal vision and distinctive artistic style.

He began this journey as an expressionist painter exploring the predicament of human condition and misery, that too, on a monumental scale. Already politically sensitized by his early life in Kerala, the poverty and suffering he witnessed on the streets of Kolkata and subsequently in New Delhi moved him to produce grim contorted human images, literally representing human beings as headless entities. Suffused with social imagery, his early works re-enacted themes of exploitation, oppression, war, human brutality, and political violence.

In stark contrast to the dark, tortured images of his older works, the latter half of his artistic journey has gradually shifted to a lyrical engagement with life and nature. The faceless, twisted male bodies were, to begin with, replaced by rustic, faceless female figures. Then, faces appeared and were combined with sensuous yet stylized human and natural forms in the epic painting ‘Yayati’. His more recent works celebrate nature and life in its myriad and multifarious forms.