'Rustic Ragas: Inner Melodies of Thota Vaikuntam'
Timeless
Books.
AbMaa Publishing, New
Delhi.
149 pages.
Full colour.
Hardcover.
2008.
Rs.
1,800.
ISBN: 9788189497155
Main essay by Aditi De.
Foreword by Krishen Khanna. He is one of India's most reputed artists. He worked as a banker from 1948
to 1961 before deciding it was far better to follow his destiny as an
artist than to stay in a secure job. A member of the Progressive Artists
Group, Bombay, he has held more than forty one-man exhibitions in India
and abroad, and participated in all the important Triennales and
Biennales in the world - at Sao Paulo, Venice, New Delhi, Tokyo and
elsewhere. His work is represented in several major museums including
the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Modern
Art, New Delhi. A recipient of the Padma Shri, he divides his time
between Delhi and Shimla.
Afterword by S H
Raza. He is an eminent Indian artist who has lived and worked in France since
1950. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981, and is a Fellow of the
Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. He is also the recipient of the Kalidas
Samman from the Madhya Pradesh State Government in 1996.
* * *
This book presents fifteen new dramatic paintings by Hyderabad-based
artist Vaikuntam. The artist grew up in a village called Boorugupalli in
the Karimnagar district within the Telangana heartland of Andhra
Pradesh.
The people of his village have often been depicted in his work,
especially his portrayals of women - they could be his mother, an
entertainer, a neighbour, a labourer, a gaze encountered in the teeming
bazaar, even a family friend from his childhood.
Vaikuntam's Telangana
folk meld the memory of his eyes and his fingers. They embody a unique
world, of daily rites of life couched within an imaginative terrain. The
monumentality of Vaikuntam's figures in rich primary colours of the
earth assume a mythical dimension, enhanced by the solidity of their
execution in acrylic. They seem like demigods, not village folk-looming,
tantalizing, almost unapproachable.
Vaikuntam voices the collective
yearning for a separate Telangana identity, beyond politics, beyond
couched cultures. His rich palette and easily recognizable faces and
figures have given his work acceptability; paintings that are strikingly
modern without any allegiance to anything usually associated with
modernity. In these huge canvases, Vaikuntam immortalizes his earthy
icons for all time.
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