Installation View
RAJAN ONE
The gallery is proud to present a two-part ‘selected retrospective’ of the artist CK Rajan. Born in Kerala in 1960 Rajan attended art college in Trivandrum, Baroda and Hyderabad and he has gone on to produce a singular body of work which has been shown internationally. These two exhibitions provide an opportunity for audiences to see art made between 1989 and 2022 and to observe the developments as well as the consistency of this artist’s practice. Works are defined by a modesty of means and use materials from the everyday to create an art that is visually compelling, idiosyncratic and quietly subversive. In them we can see allusions to 20th Century Soviet Modernism, references to contemporary culture, and hints of the political.
Rajan One focuses on CK Rajan’s practice from the 1990s. In Search of Utopia (1989– 90) is a series of small-scale works painted on the inside of cigarette packets that suggest geometric cityscapes, stadiums and astronomical observatories. Table Top Sculptures made around the same time, are a set of primary-coloured boxes with apertures through which partly concealed objects (a gun, a toy car) appear. Rajan’s Mild Terrors produced between 1992– 96 are perhaps his best-known works. These jewel-like collages take images cut from newspapers and magazines to both observe and critique the social transformations recorded in popular print. The artist has consistently used notebooks to experiment with image and text and here originals as well as reproductions reveal a breadth of ideas that also inform his sculpture and collage. The exhibition features archival material related to the artist’s biography and exhibition history, and coincides with the publication of the first comprehensive monograph on CK Rajan’s work.
The exhibition is curated by Grant Watson.