TV Santhosh gets a mini-profile on LiveMint on the occasion of his Grosvenor Gallery show in London:
His voice is barely audible, but Santhosh ranks as one of India’s most eloquent artists, driven by political rather than more immediate human concerns. He doesn’t share in this assessment, though. “It is not a political, but a philosophical approach,” he says about his art. Terrorism, war, military intervention, injustice—in the decade or more that Santhosh has been painting, he has passionately involved himself with the larger world and with events that grab the media’s attention. In fact, most of his imagery is sourced from the media: photographs of captured terrorists, the spectacle of war and bomb blasts, uniformed securitymen with sniffer dogs on leash. [ . . . ]
Santhosh’s political (philosophical) leanings took shape in the early 1980s in Trichur, Kerala, with Pratikarana Sangam, an activist group. “It was after Chernobyl happened and then the Bhopal gas tragedy struck in India. We painted posters protesting these events and depicting the side effects of so-called progress and pasted them all over Kerala,” he says. Later, he studied sculpture at Santiniketan, West Bengal, and then went on to do a master’s in fine art at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
TV Santhosh ‘Political’ Works Are More Relevant Than Ever Before (Livemint)
