Internationally acclaimed Indian artist KS Radhkrishnan’s solo show, which is listed as one of the top five solo exhibitions by Indian artists in Asia by ArtInfo, is going on at Bengal Art Lounge, Gulshan.
Titled “Conflict Within: Ascending/Descending Figures,” the exhibition displays a multitude of bronze figures in ascending and descending shape that calls to mind the similarities shared by the human kind despite their continuous fights regarding religion, gender, class and caste.
Through these small intimate figures “the artist highlights the conflicts within humanity which could make or break civilisation,” writes Premjish Achari. However, the conflicts lead the race to move forward and the artist, perhaps, hails the ever disagreeing instinct which, finally, bonds us to a certain direction.
In the work titled “Boat on the Head,” the insightful artist presents a human head carrying a boat laden with small figures. The boat represents the journey of an individual while the tiny figures signify the thousands of characters he played in different moments of his entire life.
In a few exhibited pieces, the imaginative artist, interestingly, portrayed the miniature human figures as the shapes of waves of breeze and water. Such sculptures are “Breeze through the Railing,” “Twisting Wind” and “Wet Home.” In the artwork “Musui with a Bursting Cloud,” the miniature figures, altogether, create a form of a cloud. It is a part of his series work on “Musui” and “Maiya,” two characters through whom Radhakrishnan expresses his impressions on man and woman as individual identities.
Professor R Siva Kumar of The Department of Art History, Viswabharati University, reveals: “Musui is modeled after a santhal youth he had known long years ago as a student in Santiniketan, but in Radhakrishnan’s recent sculptures, he appears not as a particular person but as metaphor of mind’s lightness, of its ability to assume a multiplicity of persona or identities. Maiya is his female counterpart, and one of the many others, he morphs into.”
The artwork “Musui Celebrated” fascinates the viewers by portraying a moment of bursting romance when the lovers Musui and Maiya celebrate their love in a mode of aerial dance. The weightless state of human mind, that the artist always cherishes, has been symbolised by different acrobatic movements of Musui and Maiya in a number of artworks.
The works of KS Radhakrishnan are in many private and public collections around the world and are being shown for the first time in Bangladesh. This show has been organised in collaboration with Akar Prakar from Kolkata with the help of ICCR.