Cart Menu
Shopping Cart Summary Your shopping cart is empty
Menu
SEARCH 
Love Art?

Subscribe to our weekly images newsletter and be the first to discover emerging artists from South Asia.

Ganesh Selvaraj

Chennai, India Born 1976

Attained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1998 and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 2000 at the Government College of Arts & Crafts, Chennai; studied printmaking at Edinburgh Print Makers, UK in 2004

 

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Edinburgh Print Makers, Scotland (2004)

 

Selected Group Exhibitions

In the Fore, The Noble Sage, London (2008); Chennai Chart, Forum Art Gallery, Chennai (2007); Take Two - Chennai Chapter, Sumukha Art Gallery, Chennai (2006); Genesis 8, Forum Art Gallery, Chennai (2006); Entrusted, Charles Wallace Trust, New Delhi (2006); Genesis 7, Lalit Kala Academi, Chennai (2004); Tamil Nadu State Exhibition, Chennai (2002); Lalit Kala Academi Exhibition, Chennai (2001); Nokia National Art Exhibition, New Delhi (2000); Asia Pacific International Art Exhibition, South Korea (2000); International Print Exhibition, Barcelona (2000); Genesis 6, Lalit Kala Academi, New Delhi (1999); Genesis 5, Lalit Kala Academi, Chennai (1999); Genesis 4, Chitra Kala Parishad, Bangalore (1999); Genesis 3, Lalit Kala Academi, Chennai (1997); Genesis 2 (Print Show), GCAC, Chennai (1997); 39th National Exhibition of Art, New Delhi (1997); Genesis 1, Lalit Kala Academi, Chennai (1996)

 

Selected Awards

Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Fellowship Award, UK (2004); Asia Pacific International Art Award & Lalit Kala Academi Research Scholarship (2000); Tamil Nadu Award (1998)

Ganesh Selvaraj is one of the most talented and reflective artist-thinkers of the new school emerging in Chennai. Moving forward with young contemporaries such as B. Perciyal and V. Anamika, Selvarajs art has matured at a rate his interests becoming ever more discerning and complex. Like Anamika, he has long held a commitment to abstraction, unafraid of exploring innovative concepts in new techniques and forms. One of the four artists in the Genesis group, Selvaraj is focused on poetically describing identity, existence and experience as encrypted in the periphery of our vision, between the footnotes of our human pages and within the blankets of our memories. Existence itself is an experience, a universal phenomena, says the artist, every existence has its own experiences. Experiencing existence in my own solitary way gives me pleasure towards my existence. My existential journeying finds transformation in my process of art-making and my final found forms. To Selvaraj, the creative process must be one that embodies the experience of living. Likewise, the finished work must be life itself. These new works on paper demonstrate this well. Many are executed on graph paper or on specially-devised grids. They are carried out hypnotically; whether it is blocks of lines within rectangles and further lines within them or else squares within a grid coloured in a set colour scheme. Within each ruler line or square of colour one senses all the elements of Selvarajs living the breaths taken, the blinks made, the yawns and smiles drawn, the thoughts, memories and ideas that came and went through his mind. Selvarajs time and passage is explored in every work in this indirect manner. The works imply an elegant ordered truth: we are born, we reproduce, we die. Further elaborated: we are born, were produce, we are happy, we are sad, we die. Still further: we are born, we reproduce, we are happy, we are sad, we try to break this cycle of happiness and sadness, we die. Ganesh Selvaraj shows us the multiplicity and limitation within the ordered universe we live in and does it with heart. He implies existential questions: what if we could feed a persons life into a barcode and feel it afterwards? On the one hand, a person cannot be summed up in one conversation or even after several years friendship. On the other, are we not the make-up of the lines on our forehead? Isnt that the best and most infinite way to sum up a human being?

Portfolio