K S Radhakrishnan is arguably India’s foremost modern sculptor, observes Kishore Singh of the artist’s incredible talent and an evolving story to tell
Radhakrishnan, you imagine, would make a jolly Santa, all twinkle-eyed ho-ho-ho and a girth to match, his beard in full flow, if a little short on elves to manage the posting and packing since he’s been working on his current exhibition for some years now. Since, also, as he points out, “each sculpture takes two years to make”. Arguably, that should be many, many sculptures, for a Radha — as he’s known — work consists of many, many elements, each its own work of art, collated together into a giant form that constitutes his assemblage. Calling it just one sculpture would be like calling the Kandariya Mahadev temple in Khajuraho just one piece of sculpture.
Radha’s is a fascinating world, a spot he has inhabited since the nineties, when he was “discovered”, or at least did not any more have to worry about commissions, left alone (as much as an artist can be left alone) to his own freedoms and expressions, telling his story through Musui, a Santhal figure whom he first spotted while in Santiniketan, as a student of the iconic Ramkinkar Baij, “the father of modern Indian sculpture”, using him as a character that “you grow into” even as he gave him shape.
But Musui could hardly inhabit a void, he needed a counterpart, a female, balancing half. “The necessity of Maiya” — the other character who has been constant in his works — “was important for my story-telling. She can be everything from a rat catcher to Nataraj, from a yakshi to Mona Lisa.” By the nineties, it was Maiya who had taken over his world, generating into an ever-growing, free-wheeling, demi-goddess “evoking so much movement from within you that it is almost yogic”, Radha struggles to explain the apparent lightness of her being while she cartwheels, cavorts, leaps and balances above masses of smaller sculptures in an orgiastic, pagan dance, caught in choreographed movement on his huge work that is titled The Ramp.
This, the ramp, has been with him since 2004, a platform that teases his sculptures into movement, something Radha says has been “the primary intent of Indian sculptural tradition” — an allusion to Khajuraho might again be in order — because “you can be stationary on a staircase but people cannot stand idle on a ramp, its very structure makes movement necessary”.
The ramp as an idea was first conceived for an aborted Tata Steel commemorative sculpture, but it remained with him, to ultimately become a work in progress of a scale that had not previously been seen in at least contemporary sculpture. “Scale,” Radha explains, “sometimes matters, as a point of viewing,” but he enjoys it more because, he says, “when you work with scale, you create a lot of surprises, you shock yourself.”
Radha had come to Santiniketan to study painting, but found himself fascinated more by Ramkinkar Baij’s sculpture, and stayed on as his last student. “His sculpture was like modelling, that’s what I took to,” he recalls those days, planning in clay as he worked with disparate, figurative shapes that would remain his hallmark, though as he created larger and yet larger figures, he found himself using beeswax, “which is more malleable, more flexible” but requires greater spontaneity to fashion.
As a result — he looks around at the exhibition he is mounting — “sometimes you submit to the beeswax (and the shape it takes), sometimes you dominate (the form).”
The nineties defined Radha when he was discovered by the French, while participating in a Triennale in an Obsonvile studio, and the early years of that decade found him returning to that country again and again, to participate in exhibitions as much as to work on commissions across the country, to the South of France, his most exemplary work finding a home at the Time Manager International campus in Cotignac. That created the Radha legend, and he was feted as much around the world as in India, yet little has changed in either his language or his content. “In my medium,” he says of the bronze in which his sculptures are cast, “I remain very traditional, but the result can still be” — it is — “very contemporary.” As for ideas, “things are happening, evolving, changing in time”, which is why he refuses, he says, to work to deadlines, exhibiting only when he is ready.
The Delhi-based sculptor’s current exhibition (it was shown earlier close to his alma mater, in Kolkata, and he hopes it will be next on view in his home state, Kerala) addresses the issue of liminality, “of wanting to be in another space”, and pointing out to the newest of his works, where figures, like fireflies, could be “collectively descending” or more probably ascending, from a barrel-like spot, he positions it as a collective yearning for “evolving to a landing space” but not yet “a landed space”.
Wind to the future, to Radha the teacher. As often before, February will see him conducting a month-long workshop in Baroda with 12 well-known international sculptors to “help provide exposure to the young”, and then an overdue — due to bureaucracy, not because of Radha — curation on Ramkinkar Baij at the National Gallery of Modern Art in the capital, hopefully by the end of 2010. But in the here and present, as people pour in to rapt admiration, Radha can only hope that it is art they will see in Musui and Maiya, in the phalanx of dancers as each sways in beatific — or as Radha says, “organic” — motion, amazingly alive to the act of celebration not of some divine congregation, but of the sculptor’s will and creation.
