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.
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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.
