Grosvenor Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by the acclaimed Indian artist, T.V. Santhosh in collaboration with The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai.

“The images I use have been appropriated from all over and refer to this notion of being under attack and being wounded. It’s like as soon as India begins to recover from one attack another one happens. It happens all over: we keep inflicting wounds on society. When it heals, another wound occurs.”
- T.V. Santhosh

Santhosh continues to use media related images and photographs to explore themes of terrorism, injustice and war, drawing attention to the influence the media has on our perceptions of reality. Building on the success of his 2009 show with the gallery, this event follows the artist’s rise to fame during the last five years.

In his paintings, Santhosh reminds us of the “tinted glasses” through which the public sees topical events unfold by appropriating images from newspapers, magazines and news channels.  His subjects - protestors, soldiers, injured civilians - are made to look like negatives in the tradition of Man Ray’s ‘Rayograms,’ with the viewer looking at the image almost as if through a thermographic camera or an x-ray machine.  In this way, the artist creates a distance between the work itself and the actual event, disguising the parochial, and allowing local concerns to acquire a universal significance and thus wider response.

Having first trained as a sculptor, Santhosh, who considers himself a “painterly minded sculptor,” creates art which has the clarity and composition of a film still.  Yet, there is a strong aesthetic element in his work. Vibrantly coloured in luminous yellows, greens and reds, his paintings grab our attention.

Santhosh has seen a meteoric rise to fame in the past few years carving out a unique space within the contemporary Indian art scene. His paintings and sculptures appear regularly at auction, and feature in the collections of Charles Saatchi and Frank Cohen and others.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Grosvenor Gallery