Sumedh Rajendran
Sumedh Rajendran |
Hailed as one of the new age sculptors of Indian contemporary art scene, Sumedh Rajendran has been working with mediums that are radically unconventional. Born to a family of artists, Sumedh learned his drawing skills from his grand father, who was a well known painter in South Travancore during the last century. Sumedh polished his skills while working with his artist father G.Rajendran and started working on large scale sculpture projects at a very early age itself. After his schooling he joined Trivandrum Fine Arts College and obtained BFA in Sculpture. Later he did his MFA in Sculpture from Delhi College of Art.
Locating history in the evolution of architecture was Sumedh’s earlier concern in sculpture. He worked in fibre glass and plaster of Paris during his student period in Delhi College of Art. History, he understood as a series of invasions and inscriptions and a thorough study of the Foucauldian theories on human body and its politics helped him to evolve his engagement with history. He produced a series of iconic and emblematic bodies that inscribed the development of history in sculptural terms.
Once out of college, as a freelance artist living in the metropolitan city of Delhi, Sumedh worked on the issues of migration, city planning and the notions of human progress and development. He did innumerable sketches of those metropolitan architectural images that stood in for the economic as well as social growth. Catching the irony of growth in the plight of a floating population, Sumedh diverted his attention towards the mundane aspects of urban life such as buses, pavements, public toilets and so on, using mundane materials dexterously converted into powerful aesthetic mediums.
Sumedh’s sculptural renderings using mosaic tiles, plywood, aluminum board, enamel advertisement sheets, corrugated sheets, paper, rusted iron, leather, upholstery materials, plastic, iron sheets etc have earned him a great reputation internationally. Currently he is working on a series of sculptures using enamel advertisement sheets collected from different places. An artist who does not compromise with experiments for the sake of a signature style, Sumedh in each of his solos reveals a new world of sculptural aesthetics.
In early 2007 Sumedh undertook a residency program in Manchester where he worked on a series of drawings using different kinds of papers, mostly developed for industrial purposes. These drawings occupy a place between two dimensional drawings and three dimensional studies. Often Sumedh brings back the images that he has used in his sculptures and give them a new feel in these paper collage drawings. |
