The Crowd and its Avatars

Sculptures by KS RadhaKRiShnan


Curated by R Siva KumaR

KS Radhakrishnan with The Crowd, 2022

KS Radhakrishnan is one of India’s most significant
sculptors, and he works almost exclusively in bronze.
He was born in Kottayam district of Kerala in 1956. After
completing his under-graduation from St. Berchmans’
College, Changanacherry, Radhakrishnan went to
Santiniketan in 1974 to pursue formal training in art
from the prestigious Kala Bhavana of Visva Bharati
University, There he was mentored and trained by two
important figures of Indian modernism – Ramkinkar
Baij and Sarbari Roy Choudhury. His sculptural talents
were acknowledged at a very young age when he
was awarded with the National Scholarship offered
by Government of India in 1978. During these early
formative years of his career Radhakrishnan was
invited to be part of many exhibitions at the Lalit Kala
Akademi and the Birla Academy of Art and Culture.
He completed his MFA in the year of 1981 and was
awarded with a research grant by Lalit Kala Akademi,
Delhi to work in Garhi Village. This gave him an
opportunity to move to Delhi and explore the diverse
artistic practices of the metropolis. Since then, he
had more than fifteen solo shows including Mapping
with Figures the Evolving Art of KS Radhakrishnan at
National Gallery of Modern Art (Bengaluru), Centre
des Bords de Marne, Le Perreux-Bry-sur-Marne
(France), Lalit Kala Akademi (New Delhi) and at the
Birla Academy of Art and Culture (Kolkata) amongst


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others. Among the numerous group shows at which
his works have been exhibited are the National
Exhibition at New Delhi (1980); Triennalle India (1990);
Salon International de la Sculpture Contemporaine at
Nouveav Forum des Halles, Paris (1995); Hippodrome
d’elongchamp, Paris (1996); Espace Michel Simon-
Noisy le grand, France (1996), and Beijing Biennale
(2012). From 1980’s onwards Radhakrishnan has
installed open air sculptures across the country and
abroad including at the TMI foundation, Cotignac,
France.

The two major themes or motifs of Radhakrishnan’s
works are Maiya and Musui; two archetypal figures of
woman and man through whom the artist’s vision of
the world is unfolded in myriad ways. His sculptures
range from the small and intimate in scale to the
large and lofty in dimension. They are shaped by his
meditations on migration, history, memory, loss and
nostalgia, and demonstrate his deep engagement
with the world around him. He bestows a sensuous
quality on his sculptures through the subtleties of
modelling and the extraordinary body movements of
his figures.


Radhakrishnan has curated the exhibition Ramkinkar
Baij - A Retrospective in 2012 at National Gallery


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of Modern Art, New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai,
where a book titled Ramkinkar’s Yaksha Yakshi
written by him was released. Radhakrishnan has been
awarded K.C.S. Panickar Puraskar, 2011 Government
of Kerala. In 2019, he curated an exhibition, 100 Years
of Kalabhavan - Pillars of an Artscape at Kala Bhavana,
Santiniketan. In 2022, he curated - Somnath Hore a
centenary exhibition at Arthshila, Santiniketan and at
Emami Art, Kolkata. He worked on a well-documented
book on Somnath Hore on the occasion of centenary
exhibition. Radhakrishnan curated another exhibition
- Iti, Satyajit Da, Letters to a friend from Satyjit Ray
at KCC, Kolkata. Radhakrishnan is a distinctive and
appealing presence on the modern Indian sculpture
scene. He lives in Delhi with his wife and son.


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Curator’s note


The Crowd and its avatars
The Recent Sculptures by KS Radhakrishnan


Born in Kerala in 1956 and trained in sculpture at
Santiniketan, KS Radhakrishnan belongs to a small
group of notable sculptors of his generation who
have collectively brought about a far-reaching
resurgence in Modern Indian sculpture.

Like his mentors,
Radhakrishnan is
primarily a modeller
who works in clay
and makes his work
permanent in bronze,
and the human figure
is his main subject.
Since 1996 he has been
working with two, part
real and part imaginary,
characters called Musui
and Maiya. He uses
them, on the one hand,
to explore the physical


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and social world around us and to speculate on the
nature of its reality, and on the other, to explore the
possibilities of the human body and the potentialities
of sculpture itself.

The body is a marker of our
individuality and our shared
humanity, but our political
and social realities fracture
our collective humanness at
many levels. Radhakrishnan
engages with this conundrum
of our existence through
explorations of unitariness
and collectivness using the
human figure. His recent
work assumes three main
forms: the single-figure
sculptures that explore
human singularity through bodies that evoke
freedom through gravity-defying acrobatic postures
performed with astonishing ease; the Ramps in
which the singular and the many enter into sculptural
dialogues; and a series of small sculptures in which
an infinite number of tiny figures are brought
together to form shape-shifting murmuration-like
human formations.


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He offers these
sculptural meditations
not as ponderous
statements but as subtle
experiences that we, as
viewers, have to flesh
out with our eyes, mind
and imagination. And
his working process
provides us with an entry
point into his sculptures.
Fragmentation,
repetition, and grafting
define his work process. Most of his large figures,
invoking the singular and almost all the smaller
ones denoting the deindividualized multitudes, are
done by welding multiple fragments together. He is
suggesting, as it were, that our sense of wholeness
and singularity of form and movement is an illusion
born out of parts fused together.













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Such a work process introduces an element of play
into his ostensibly representational sculptures, the
play of turning one into many and many into one.
It creates a sculptural inventiveness suffused with
pleasure. And what we often see as lightness and
joyousness in his figures is an outward expression of
the play at the heart of their making.

Prof. R Siva Kumar
Art Historian and Writer































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The Crowd


The word crowd is often associated with rioters,
looters, protestors, and revolters. A crowd is seen as
destructive or revolutionary depending upon from
which side of the ideological divide we look at them.
They are sometimes an unhappy group of leaderless
anarchists, and sometimes they are a people turned
into an instrument of brutality by a demagogue. And
occasionally, they are seen as people dehumanised
and rendered helplessly frozen by a totalitarian
power, as in the work of the Polish sculptor Magdalena
Abakanowicz.
























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The people in Radhakrishnan’s sculpture The Crowd
have a different ancestry. They have their origins in
the quotidian patterns of our daily life; in the people
who cross each other at a street corner, on a railway
platform or in a market square. Or gather together in
a celebration of social conviviality at a performance of
popular music or a festive fair. These are transient and
recurring events in a city’s or town’s life. A city square,
a railway station, a fairground, or a marketplace fills,
comes alive and empties out day after day. People
breathe life into these spaces, and while doing so,
their individualities are temporarily subsumed but not
entirely erased. The crowd is a poetic celebration of
this aspect of our life.























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This is a sculpture not meant to be experienced from a
distance or from the outside. The space between the
figures is an invitation to us, the viewers, to enter the
crowd, be a part of it and experience it from within.
Not just with our eyes but also with our bodies, as the
figures respond to each other.

Prof. R Siva Kumar
Art Historian and Writer



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Smiles are truth-sayers, they announce much of the
person’s being. They mark out happy souls, or those
that want to be. On the constant ramped climb, smiles
prepare the soul for adventure, open it to the beauty
of others, set it on a path anew. The smile revokes pain,
reduces crises to cares, and cares to caresses. A smile
is an expression in the right direction in the search for
meaning that demands internal and external bearing.

Yet, as much as we like the smile, it will remain a sign
of fear, of dismay, a disguise to hide the reality of
what is really happening on this climb. We desire the
smile of happiness in our loved ones, and we demand
the subservient smile from those we pay. We train
ourselves to ignore the fine line between the smile
and the grimace, but the more we train, the more we
see. That smile that does not reach above the upper
lip leaves everyone looking up into the eyes, and
maybe these windows should not be ignored.

There is a Smile of Love
And there is a Smile of Deceit
And there is a Smile of Smiles
In which these two Smiles meet

And there is a Frown of Hate
And there is a Frown of Disdain



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And there is a Frown of Frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core
And it sticks in the deep Back bone
And no Smile that ever was Smild
But only one Smile alone

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave
It only once Smild can be
But when it once is Smild
Theres an end to all Misery

William Blake, ‘The Smile’

We seek that part of
ourselves we know is
missing. And there it
is, right in front of us:
tumbling, frolicking,
dancing, and inviting
us to join in. Pointing
to hints and clues just
out of reach. Out of
reach, but not beyond
possibility.

Raimi Gbadamosi on Liminal
Figures Liminal Space


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The tiny figures that represent them are faceless;
even their biological identities are ambivalent and
they are bereft of all markers of individuality. They
are images of people who have, like the artist, left
a world behind, and carry memories of it, but the
struggles of daily life do not give them the leisure
to ponder over it, to remember it, to feel nostalgic
about it, to savour it in imagination, to mourn its
loss or to raise it as an alternative to the present.
Migrant recollections and the migrants’ life are
explored at two levels
in Radhakrishnan’s
sculptures.
Remembrances bring
the distant closer,
give it a sweetness,
a grace in excess of
life and enlarge it in
the mind’s eye. The
struggle, unless it
is heroic, stamped
with imminent
success or tragic
doom, diminishes the
individual, makes him
ordinary, reduces him
to the common man.


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The Musui and Maiya sculptures, true to Musui’s
innate impish spirit, are parodic impersonations.
Playing at being exemplary individuals – the Buddha,
Christ, Nataraja – like impersonators and actors they
call to question our faith in immutable individualities
and subvert them into feigned identities. They
are liminal figures who through assuming multiple
identities dissolve all social demarcations and by
being ‘this’ and ‘that’ are always between and
betwixt. The second group of sculptures showing
un-gendered,
identity-less bodies in
migration is essentially
about liminal spaces.
Boxes, vessels,
and every kind or
receptacle and surface
into which they fly into
or cling onto assume
identities – become
home, city, the world
– through human
occupation.
Prof. R Siva Kumar
Art Historian and Writer





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Published on the occasion of the exhibition titled
‘The Crowd and its Avatars: Sculptures by KS Radhakrishnan’
curated by R Siva Kumar at Emami Art, Kolkata.

9 January - 12 February, 2023
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