“When I was a student, shy and introverted, my pieces were as if enclosed within themselves”. -  KS Radhakrishnan

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The evolution of KS Radhakrishnan’s sculptural voice has been intimately connected with his own context and conditions. The young student from rural Kerala flourished in Santiniketan but also lived with the interiority of one who struggled with the local language and was focussed on his work. He calls his work, mere suggestions of figures, ‘introverted’ sculpture. “Even if I had a human reference in my mind, this was not visible in the abstract contours.”

 

These pieces are, as art historian R. Siva Kumar describes, “truncated bodies, parts infused with the spirit of the whole”. Mother Torso was his first sculpture, the one after seeing which Prof. Sarbari Roy Choudhury encouraged him to take up this art. Despite their abstract and fragmented form, these sculptures expressed a profound interest in movement and dynamism. The series of stage figures and performing figures recollect Radhakrishnan’s childhood fascination for his father’s theatre activities and his involvement with the theatre group Vikalpa in the early 1980s.

 

Slowly limbs started becoming visible and figuration started becoming apparent.

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“My introverted pieces started slowly opening up after my coming to Delhi and the widening of my horizons. Once I could express myself more freely, so could my work.” In 1986, the year his son was born, he made both ‘Mother and Child’ as well as ‘Family’, and figuration entered to tell the human story in its own way.