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From Santhal Family to The Ramp

Noted sculptor K.S.Radhakrishnan learned his techniques from Ramkinkar Baij. He paid rich tributes to his master while presenting a paper on the evolution of his own sculptures at the MPCVA, Mumbai. JohnyML reports from Mumbai. 

“Ramkinkar Baij was one of the greatest observers of life. He rarely stepped out of the rural Shantiniketan. But from remaining there also he achieved the greatest heights in modern sculpture. Ramkinkar drew from life, minimalized it to sheer forms. And he was not making sculptures but he was structuring and interpreting life through the form of sculpture,” said the noted contemporary Indian sculptor K.S.Radhakrishnan. He was delivering a lecture on the evolution of his sculptures at Mumbai’s Mohile Parikh Centre for Visual Arts. In front of an invited audience Radhakrishan, popularly known as Radha paid rich tribute to his master Ramkinkar Baij by creating a preamble discourse on the pivotal works of the master sculptor.

Radhakrishnan while narrating the history of Indian contemporary sculpture through the examples of Ramkinkar Baij works and his own repertoire of sculptures said that he had the rare opportunity to do Ramkinkar Baij’s portrait during the last year of his life. It was a life time opportunity for the young Radhakrishan in 1980 for the simple reason that Ramkinkar was reluctant to model for any other sculptor, though he enjoyed making others model for him. “Ramkinkar Baij brought life to studios. He brought live models and sketched from real life before making sculptural renditions. This gave an opportunity to young students like us to work with the live models. Ramkinkar Baij was a visionary and a modernist. We drew our spirits from him,” said Radhakrishnan.

Recollecting his student experiences in Shantiniketan during early seventies, Radhakrishnan said that the presence of Ramkinkar Baij and then his choicest predecessor Sarbari Roy Chowdhury made young art students like Radha to opt for sculpting. “When I left Kerala with a small amount of money that my father had given to me, I did not have any idea about the discipline called sculpture. Like any other young boy interested in drawing I was inclined to study painting. But Shantiniketan and the master sculptors made all the difference in my life,” recounted Radhakrishnan.

Playing with forms was the primary interest that Radhakrishnan had during the initial years. Clay gave him a sense of tactility. He enjoyed touching it and modeling various forms unmindful of the thematic directions. However, the first sculpture that he made was quite geometrical, inspired by the minimalism practiced by Ramkinkar Baij, and he called it ‘Mother Torso’. It was called Mother Torso because the forms in pure terms of geometrical abstraction reflected the movements of a body. Later he enlarged the Mother Torso in concrete as a public commission was given to him by the government of Rajasthan. Now this sculpture is in a public site in Bikaner.

Pepping his sculptural journey with humorous anecdotes Radhakrishnan vivified how he experimented with forms and at times with themes. “Themes were not my initial concern. I was more interested in movements. I wanted to defy gravity and bring in impossible postures to the figures. I wanted them to be air bound. I want to bring a sense of lightness into the massive forms made in bronze,” Radhakrishnan said.

Impossibility of movements that the viewer finds in Radhakrishnan’s sculptures, in his own words, “are not intended to tell the viewer that such contortionist positions are possible. Instead, I want to deal the philosophy of life, that beauty is possible even in the direst forms of existence.” Dealing with lightness and the airborne nature of sculptures, Radhakrishnan said that sculpture has an inherent quality to make people involve. It deals with space and space is the place where people interact with a sculpture. For a long time he used female forms to host his ideas and themes like Durga, Mahishasur, Woman on the Rock and so on became an inevitability.

Radhakrishnan’s works are more site-specific and installation-like in nature. They find their inherent freedom to fly up in the open spaces. While working on a long term public project in South of France in late 1990s, for the first time Radhakrishnan worked on male forms and later on it became almost an obsession for him. Taking inspiration from his college time model, whom he calls Musui, the artist created a sculptural persona of the same name. Musui became a vehicle for hosting many characters from real life and mythology. Later Radhakrishnan created a female counter part to Musui called Maiya. She too takes various forms in Radhakrishnan’s sculptures.

Human Box series was one of the interesting series that the artist did during late 1990s and the spirit of it was carried on to the Migrating People series in early years of the new century. “These people are without identities. But as a host of people they establish their identity through movements and clinging together. They migrate to any space and become a part of it.” Radhakrishnan said that these works in a way reflected the present living conditions in urban spaces. Migration is a social issue and he deals with an empathetic verve.

Radhakrishnan talked about his magnum opus, The Ramp and he elaborated the context of its origin. It was meant to be a public commission and somehow it could not take off. He had spent almost two years in preparing the monumental work. However unfazed by the rejection Radhakrishnan went to on to do his Ramp where people move in choreographed movements. He established a new identity and monumentality to his ambitious Ramp series by incorporating the Musui-Maiya duos in various evocative mythological figures like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Sarada Devi, Selkit and so on.

While interacting with the host of artists, critics and enthusiastic art students, Radhakrishnan spilled a few technical secrets. He presented visuals of his studio and the method of his casting and said how he selected various gestures and made them unique through permutations and combinations of the already casted forms. He also mentioned how the 19th century French sculptor Rodin used a similar technique in creating even monumental works. He compared the technical advancement of the West with the technical realities faced by an Indian sculptor. “But end of the day, one cannot make out which child is born in a super speciality hospital and which one is born in a slum. End product is all what matters. And the basic technique remains the same in producing a work of art.”

Radhakrishnan’s presentation ended in an interesting interaction with the audience. To a query whether he was interested in making portraits, he said that he is a trained portraiture and during his struggling days he had done some portraits. He narrated the trials and tribulation that he faced while making the bust of Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and how it all comically ended in London. He said that he was honoured as the former President late K.R.Narayanan agreed to sit for him eight days so that he could finish his portrait. “I am interested in portraits as an artist, but my enjoyment mostly comes from the challenges that I face during the creation of my own aesthetics.” Perhaps being the only sculptor in India who is devoted to the medium of Bronze, Radhakrishnan said that certain other mediums he finds quite flimsy and tedious. “India needs more public sculptures by contemporary sculptors and there should be efforts to know the contribution of a master sculptor like Ramkinkar Baij,” he concluded.