In 2003, prominent art dealer Usha Mirchandani and her daughter Ranjana opened Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Colaba, just behind The Taj Mahal Palace hotel, and began working with a circle of emerging young talents who are now significant names in the Indian art scene. Last year, the gallery relocated to a 460-square-meter space inside a stone-clad heritage building in Fort’s Ballard Estate, where it continues to rep some of the country’s most sought- after contemporary artists. The beautiful, light-filled viewing room makes this a superlative experience for art aficionados (galeriems.com).

South Indian artist Ratheesh T’s practice of looking centers objects, spaces, and people, including his family in his hometown of Kilimanoor, a small town in Trivandrum, Kerala. Here we begin to peel away the layers of a “generative objective knowledge” of a place that forms the core of his work. Many of his paintings show family members and depict land, neighborhoods, and stories that have unfolded within a forty-mile radius of Kilimanoor. In effect, his paintings reveal the lives of his people and the place of his birth. However, Man and Doll (careless objects 2), a 2023 painting, turns Ratheesh T’s gaze inward.

Attributed to “magical realism”, Ratheesh T’s earlier paintings are surreal—often hypnotising—images of the mythological universe that informs the local culture he hails from. Interspersed with his personal iconography, his large-scale paintings are bold statements on social injustice and the marginalisation of the native inhabitants, who, as daily-wage earners, battle for survival and self-sustenance. ‘Allotted Land’ (2018) represents the intricate social fabric of village life in southern Kerala, ridden by poverty, manual labour, alcoholism as well as the betrayal by a political ideology which pledged social equality for all. Teeming with details, groups of figures and animals form various intersecting focal points, cohesively woven together into a singular picture plane. This “genre painting” of epic dimension suggests a deep sympathy with the “orphans of modernisation”, acutely observed by the artist “as if I was one of them”.

Ratheesh T.'s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community.

To stroll into Ratheesh T's exhibition is to walk into a maze of delights and surprises. If this doesn't sound lofty enough for an art exhibition, the artist wouldn't mind. I know because I had the unexpected pleasure of his company as I browsed. ‘Art is about enjoyment,' he says to me with a big smile. An apt comment on his large canvasses filled with Kerala's lively colours, talkative characters and bustling activity. 

Kerala-based artist Ratheesh T.’s new work explores matters of the moment in his richly toned portraits and landscapes, says Tejal Pandey

A few years ago, Henry Kaufman, the fabled economist formerly at Salomon Brothers, told me in his crusty German accent that "much in financila markets and life is comparative". 

Ratheesh T, one of the youngest names in the realm of Indian contemporary art, has established a signature in how he portrays Kerala. Most of his works are known to be inspired by the forests and people of Kerala, with lush green backdrops populated by humans, who clearly seem to belong there. The artist is bringing a solo exhibition of his recent paintings to the city, at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke.

In his debut solo exhibition at Mumbai's Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, "Moving Earth," the young, Kerala-born Ratheesh T gave viewers the sensation of having fallen into a fantastically lucid dream. But the artist's otherworldly images belie the pointed message they … convey, as the seven canvases in this suite  offer a poetic stocktaking of some of the most essential conflicts and destructive conditions facing India today. 

Surreal, twisted and often disturbing, Ratheesh T's new works are full of violence, despair and darkness. Blood streams through the intricate streets. Krishnas, Jesuses and mosques stand with beatific expressions while innocents are hunted and killed. A carpenter with a distinct resemblance to Ratheesh himself lies on a crate marked fragile, in the precise pose as that of an old skeleton near him. 

There is no disputing the fact ha Ratheesh T's paintings are born out of an unlikely alliance between the picturesque landscapes and bustling townscapes of his native Kerala - for the tension between tradition and modernity is palpable in the concerns he explores. Environmental degradation and social instability are evidentlv major issues that disturb him and his hyper-realistic paintings place them centerstage through the juxtaposition of unrelated backdrops and colourful characters in his dramatic compositions.