Youngest artist at Kochi Biennale to exhibit work at Sharjah

The artwork of C Unnikrishnan, the youngest artist at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which is a wall of painted bricks piled up in an off-beat manner, has been selected for the 12th Sharjah Biennale.
The fledgling artist at the ongoing biennale through the wall of little pictures, tells stories which viewers say they can relate to.
Eungie Joo, the curator of the three-month exhibition at the Gulf emirate starting on March 25, was thoroughly impressed with it after she paid a visit to its Kochi counterpart recently.
"I did not realise that I would be exhibiting at the main biennale," says 23-year-old Unnikrishnan, a native of Pezhumpara village in Palakkad district of central Kerala.

"I was overwhelmed about exhibiting with artists of international renown," he said about his participation in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Unnikrishnan says his biennale work at CSI Bungalow in Fort Kochi is a continuation of what he did as a college student.

It is a freestanding wall of more than 300 bricks each featuring a canvas with a very personal take on life around him.
So there is a string of jasmine buds, pots and pans, a real skeleton of a lizard, fish, coconuts drying, women in purdah, ants dragging along a dead fly; every picture tells such a story that the viewer forgets each one is contained within the space of a rectangular terracotta cube.

"It is a diary of local history and folklore," says the artist, who used oils and acrylics for his unique work.