C.K. Rajan's collages with their cut and paste of images gathered from newspapers and magazines have a formal beauty about them, a delicacy and precision and at the same time – in an avant-garde tradition of collage – they function as an incisive tool for political commentary. Made between 1992 and 96, they record in a tangential way the changes that took place in India during the first years of economic liberalisation to the physical as well as the social fabric of urban centres in particular. In these works, the artist responds to a visual world that seems to have become unreadable, one in which the uneven pace of development within cities, and between the urban and the rural, where the pre-industrial, industrial and post industrial exist cheek by jowl, has produced startling often uncomfortable juxtapositions.

Born 1960 in Kerala, India
Studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University,Baroda
MA (Painting), University of Hyderabad
Lives in Hyderabad