Raja Ravi Verma 1/4

Raja Ravi Varma was one artist I knew before the realization of wanting to become an artist. Most Indian kids would have visualized gods and goddesses as beautiful, graceful flowing clothes and nine yard sarees, the Ravi Varma style. Like Van Gogh, he is known to everyone transcending the knowledge fields of art. Yet when art history came into my life, he was also one of the most critically discussed artists. It piqued my interest to probe into this extremely mass popular artist, who is referred to as kitsch, mimetic and probably the only one who reached every home and breached the eclectic art circles, and has remained popular after a century of his existence.

Here we attempt to look into Ravi Varma to find what makes him unique, rather than comparing him to contemporary Indian pedagogy. In the ¼ edition of this exhibition, we present Raja Ravi Varma’s oleographs. In each of the coming editions, we shall be revealing his persona and his oeuvre rediscovering and uncovering his individuality. The western neoclassical influence on his art is undeniable but Varma is so much beyond the human form, he gave a modern persona to Indian gods in the public domain. He thought of mass producing in art himself, decades before artists began making copies of their works in POP art, a century before the idea of NFTs (a non-fungible token).