RM. PALANIAPPAN
Rm. Palaniappan was born in Devakottai, Tamil Nadu in 1957 and has been based in Chennai since the late 1970s. He is an alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, where he acquired a Diploma in Fine Arts, Painting in 1980 and a PG Diploma in Industrial Design, Ceramics in 1981. He studied advanced lithography at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA in 1991 and was an Artist in Residence at Oxford University, UK in 1996. He is a recipient of the Fulbright Grant, the Charles Wallace (India) Trust, International Visitorship program of USIS, and Senior Fellowship of the Government of India.
His works have been included in group exhibitions all over the world and in India he has held solo shows of his works with the galleries Art Heritage and Nature Morte in New Delhi, Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, Apparao Galleries in Chennai, and Gallery Sumukha in Bangalore. Palaniappan’s works are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art and Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Oxford University in Oxford, Cincinnati Art Museum in the US, the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Kansas, US, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Taipei Art Museum in Taiwan, the Madras Art Museum in Chennai, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others. A comprehensive retrospective of his works from 1976, entitled Mapping the Invisible, was hosted by Dakshinachitra Museum in Chennai in December, 2024
About The Work
Courtesy of Nature Morte, India
His newest works are sculptures using welded beaten copper tubes textured with metal paste with a wooden base pasted with cotton cloth and painted and textured with mixed media and acrylic and metallic paints. Each sculpture contains the image of tangled lines, lines that meander in multiple directions, twisting and turning in on themselves. The lines change colors as they progress, adding both substance and personality, suggesting the journey of life. The works resemble cartographies of military maneuvers as seen from above, landscapes based on a new type of geographic perspective. As the artist has said: “Only someone flying in space can make a three-dimensional drawing and stretch it to infinity, thus expressing complete human freedom.”