Tuesday, October 18, 2011

A complex craft! Cartoonist turned artist, Raghava KK explains the theme of his upcoming show in Mumbai titled Exquisite Cadaver

A complex craft!

Cartoonist turned artist, Raghava KK explains the theme of his upcoming show in Mumbai titled Exquisite Cadaver



Artist Raghava KK believes in reinventing his own style and experimenting with newer mediums. He started his career as a cartoonist some 10 years back but now explores several different genres like paintings, sculpture, installation, film, performances, etc. Raghava's upcoming show in India, titled Exquisite Cadaver, serves testimony to this.
"Exquisite Cadaver is a series of artwork that has arisen from a recent diasporic dilemma," he says. "I'm thrilled to be back in Mumbai after two years... Every time I come back, I show a different avatar to my audience here. This exhibition brings all my years of practice together and in a strange way unifies my disjointed selves. My cartoons play hide and seek with history."
Born in Bangalore in 1980, Raghava now shuttles between India and the US. He has worked with Grammy Award winning artist Erica Badoo to campaign for Blind children and children with AIDS; and even launched American singer-songwriter Paul Simon's Global Tour with his art works. Also, his works have been auctioned by the Queens Museum and Christie's NY. "I perform many roles — that of an artist, Indian, American, father, husband, parent, child, student, teacher. I am a thinker, a philosopher, an ingenue, and also a seller of beauty, a businessman, a politician. So fragmented is my identity, that I find it rather caricatured to identify with any one predominant role," he explains.
The name Exquisite Cadaver comes from a 19th century parlor writing game, also referred to as 'exquisite corpse', in which a sentence is constructed by a group. Similarly, the show too represents a complex search for identity and truth. "I play exquisite cadaver with my fragmented selves, creating a series of mythological characters, borrowing from tradition, history, and even my own nostalgia."

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