ART IN MOTION

“They are all in transit because they want to be elsewhere from the space they’re occupying. It is a part of the process of evolution,” says the Delhi-based artist,arguably one of the best sculptors in India.

The stick-like figures that populate the 30 sculptures in the exhibition are replicas of two fictional beings,Musui and Maiya. Musui is based on the Santhal boy (“a Buddha-like figure with a perpetually serene expression”) who

Radhakrishnan met while studying sculpture at Santiniketan. He created Maiya,Musui’s Eve-like counterpart some time later.

“While the Santhal boy might never have evolved,my

figures have. They’ve travelled the world and matured,” says Radhakrishnan. They can be turned into anyone and anything from Jesus to Mona Lisa to Durga. They are puppets in the hands of the sculptor.

In the early years,Radhakrishnan used only female figures like Durga and The Woman on the Rock. It was in the ’90s that he experimented with the male figure which later became an obsession. This was also the time when he tasted fame in India after being discovered by the French,while participating in a Triennale there.

“When the French expressed interest in my work,the Indians suddenly began to sit up and take notice,” says Radhakrishnan wryly. Since then,he has won several awards and scholarships including the National Scholarship by the Government of India and Best Sculpture Award by the Birla Academy of Art and Culture.

Radhakrishnan’s engagement with migratory human figures started with the Human Box series,made during the late ’90s but perhaps his magnum opus was The Ramp

in 2004—a glutinous mass of bronze humanity walking

haphazardly up an ascending ramp,which took two years

to develop.

Although having experimented with clay,beeswax and Plaster of Paris,he’s probably the only Indian sculptor

devoted to the medium of bronze. “It is a medium which is expensive,laborious and requires a lot of man power. But it’s the only one that allows me to create figures that have an almost air-borne feel to them,” says Radhakrishnan.

It’s easy to understand what he means. The figures

embody such a lightness of being that you almost feel afraid that if you touch them,they might vanish in a puff of smoke.

At Art Musings,Colaba,till February 13