K. P. Krishnakumar

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Krishnakumar K. P.
Born Kuttipuram, Kerala, India
Occupation Indian Painter & sculpturer

K. P. Krishnakumar (born Kuttipuram, Kerala in 1958 - 26 December 1989) was an Indian sculptor and painter.

Background

Statue of Rabindranath Tagore by K P Krishnakumar at Amar Kutir
Boatman, sculpture by k.p. krishnakumar exhibited in Kochi-Muziris binalle

K P Krishnakumar (1959- 1989) was a charismatic and well-known artist. He was also the leader of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. His meteoric career and premature death has made him legendary in contemporary art history. His early childhood and education took place in the village, Kuttippuram, Malappuram District, Kerala State.

In 1974, he travelled to Trivandrum and joined the School of Arts. Subsequently, he held a solo exhibition of paintings in 1975. He then joined the college of Fine Arts, Trivandrum and obtained a Diploma in Sculpture in 1981. In Ernakulam in 1980, parallel to the Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi exhibition, he participated in a group exhibition of posters in protest. Thereafter he went to Shantiniketan for a post diploma, and in July 1984 was admitted as a scholarship holder at the Kanoria centre for Arts in Ahmedabad. Shortly after leaving the Centre, he attended the young sculptors camp at Kasauli. Since then he had been living and working in Baroda. Amidst a vibrant sculptural front in the 1980s, he had participated in the Seven Young Sculptors exhibition organized by Kasauli Art Centre and curated by Vivan Sundaram. Krishnakumar soon after co-founded The Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association (1987–89). In 1989, K.P. Krishnakumar committed suicide.

Excerpt from Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2000: ‘This Kerala–Baroda group hammered out a militant agenda, arguing that Indian art required a radical interrogation of political and aesthetic issues. K.P. Krishnakumar adopted a heroic agenda in his brief career. He used the figural gesture, often profoundly comic, to taunt the viewer and also to signal faith in the sculptural presence itself. In an act of Brechtian double-take he hoped to reinscribe a lost humanism in the local liberationist politics of his home-state of Kerala, and thenceforth perhaps in (what he might have called) the betrayed map of the nation.’

The 1987 exhibition held at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda brought together the works of KP Krishnakumar, Jyothi Basu, K Hareendran, C Pradeep, CK Rajan, Alex Mathew, M Madhusudhan, Pushkin EH, K Reghunadhan, KR Karunakaran and Anita Dube. This was accompanied by a manifesto entrenched in leftist ideology. The manifesto openly denounced the commodification of art (most notably characterized by Sotheby’s auction in Mumbai that was supported by The Times of India. They also challenged the privileged position that the ‘middle class urban intelligentsia’ occupied in art-making that allowed them to create a bourgeoiscentred art history.

Art, argued the Radicals, belonged to and emerged from people, especially, the working classes. Their choice of materials veered away from bronze and other traditional media hitherto used for sculptures – KP Krishnakumar worked with ephemeral rough unusual material to create his pieces. In this lay the political gesture – a challenge to established norms of not just figuration but also material usage.

Artworks

In May 1985 he was invited to an artist’s camp in Goa where he executed on site a monumental sculpture of Vasco da Gama.

Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, which he helped to found in the late 1980s was a unique move in art arena.

Death

He died on 26th Dec 1989. (http://www.draksha.in/index.php/news/view/8158/Movement-is-dead-long-live-the-artist-at-Biennale.html) On the day after Christmas 23 years ago, K P Krishnakumar woke up, sipped tea, shaved his stubble and took a wash before walking out well dressed. What the young sculptor-painter did next crippled a revolutionary pan-Indian art movement, leaving his fellow activists puzzled till date over the reason behind the extreme act.

At age 31, the exuberant Malayali committed suicide. He made a strong rope by twining thinner ones, pegged it down from the wooden ceiling and hanged himself to death. That was on December 26, 1989.

Today, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, two of Krishnakumar’s works are on display in as many galleries of the city. He is the only late artist featuring in the country’s pioneering art show that began a fortnight ago.

Not many visitors at Fort Kochi’s Pepper House and Durbar Hall in downtown Ernakulam know this sombre side of an otherwise colourful festival, its organisers point out.

“Krishnakumar was an extraordinarily bold artist,” says Riyas Komu, a co-curator of the three-month event. “The inclusion of his works at the Biennale is our token of respect to him and the unique movement.”

Krishnakumar’s movement was brief; it lasted just a couple of years. But his works had a fiery effect on the country’s art scene, courtesy the brilliance and charisma of the frontline leader who studied and worked in places like Thiruvananthapuram, Santinikentan, Gujarat and Delhi.

As art scholar Geeta Kapur, who is involved in India’s first Biennale, notes, Krishnakumar’s Kerala-Baroda group hammered out a militant agenda, arguing that Indian art required a radical interrogation of political and aesthetic issues.

“He used the figural gesture, often profoundly comic, to taunt the viewer and also to signal faith in the sculptural presence itself. He hoped to reinscribe a lost humanism in the local liberationist politics of his home-state of Kerala,” she adds.

Krishnakumar’s Leftist manifesto, which openly denounced the commodification of art, may sound quaint to many in today’s art world. But some of his friends from that era, who are participating in the ongoing Biennale, hold the man’s ideologies aloft.

In fact, come this Wednesday, they are gathering to recall his life and work. With the participation of artists Jyothi Basu, Anita Dube, K Raghunathan, Alex Mathew and K Prabhakaran, the Aspinwall House in Fort Kochi will see the first-ever Krishnakumar memorial meeting anywhere.

“He was a bubbly person, talkative...and a wonderful organiser,” trails off Raghunathan, who was close to Krishnakumar and of the same age. “None of us even today know why he ended his life.”

He recalls how the radical movement was born in 1987 when a set of interactive Malayali artists launched a scheme called ‘Questions and Answers’ in Baroda, having failed to organise an exhibitions of south Indians in Delhi. “Anita (Dube) was the only non-Malayali artist to cooperate with us,” he adds.

Their contempt for the Indian elite looking at art from a British point of view found support from artists such as T K Hareendran, Alexander Devasia, E H Pushkin, Anoop Panikkar, K R Karunakaran and C Pradeep. Senior scholars sensed insolence in it, only prompting more youths to join the movement. Among them was Vivan Sundaram, who has an acclaimed installation at the Biennale and is, incidentally, husband of Geeta Kapur.

The artists in the movement left Baroda for native Kerala the next year. Soon they floated the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association in Kozhikode. Their debut exhibition in February 1989 in that Malabar city proved hugely popular, inspiring spread of activity to villages.

Its pinnacle was a 10-day art workshop at a village in central Kerala’s Thrissur district the same year. Ten days after its conclusion in Allappad on December 16, the news came that Krishnakumar is dead.

“That saddened us,” shrugs Raghunathan. “We couldn’t bounce back.”

Almost a quarter century since, Krishnakumar’s mother Ammalukutty Amma was invited to join the inaugural function of the Biennale on 12/12/12. Back in her home at Pattambi of Palakkad district, the old woman treasures 50-odd paintings of her legendary son.

External links

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