CELEBRATE GOAN ART

K KHOSA

 
 
 

 

 

Artist Profile

K Khosa

"The truly humane art is a wrestle with ourselves; it is to entangle the self with the basic stuff of reality; it is to get out of our time-bound egos and to enter the worlds of universal energy.

Can there be any other purpose of art than to convey this energy"

K. Khosa has been working as a professional painter since 1962. He has held more than ten solo exhibitions of his paintings at Delhi, Kolkota and Mumbai. Having used ink, pencil, oils and acrylics, he has participated in major national and international shows bringing him the “National Award” in 1981 and President of India’s silver plaque in 1974. To trace his growth as an artist, his paintings can be found in the significant collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Academy, Sahitya Kala Parishad of Delhi, International airport authority of India and with numerous private collections in India, America, Canada, Dubai, Hong kong and Europe.

His artistic enquiry has impelled him to collaborate with his contemporaries in poetry, literature and theatre. Such concerns also brought him the department of culture’s senior fellowship (1979-82 ) for “Integrating the visual language of art and content and coordinating it as a whole”. His paintings along with his concerns have been extensively published throughout the country including the paintings reproduced by the International Design journal (No.42) Seoul, Korea. Among the most prestigious, an extensive interview along with the reproduction of paintings was published by “Temenos 13” an international review journal devoted to the “Arts of the Imagination” published from London. Represented at Sixth Babylon International Festival of Iraq-1994. A slide presentation of the three decades of his paintings was held at an International seminar of The Indira Gandhi National Center of the Arts arranged in collaboration with the Millennium Trust of Britain in 2004.

A 28 min. documentary on the life and work of K. Khosa was released by the National Channel of Doordarshan including the D.D.World and the Prasar Bharti Channels in 2003-2004.

Perhaps, the body of Khosa's work could be divided into three decades- namely 1975 to 2005. The first decade belonged to the genre where the subject of the painting was important. The colours and forms were only instrumental here. The conviction used to be that one of the main functions of art was to help free mankind from the tyranny of transient emotions, the bondage of base desires. Well, all this used to be expressed through a technique; layering of pigments on images much removed from the naturalistic, but which nevertheless did not take them into the esoteric field as the monumental images sculpted in stone.

The second decade went on to reflect the storm of emotions or passions. Here the lines that were flowing were sinuous and yet tense. The paintings used to hover between figuration, abstraction and representation – the gentle ambiguities of each blurring into each other mutually, enchacing their feel of recondite or not so recondite yearnings.

The third decade that is the present phase belongs to some one who looks outwards, even when he learns to turn his gaze inwards to become aware of a secret life that is, the larger life buried within. Some such thought kindled in him the desire to study the Sanskrit texts like the Upanishads and to grasp the roots of our very being. The study inspired him to paint in a fresh way. A manifestation of the spirit of all the five elements of nature, like those invoked in the Vedic hymns. The theme of the earth and the water constituted the basis of innumerable life-giving myths.

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