When I was invited to write this short text about four painters that work with Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, I was uncertain how to proceed, being largely unfamiliar with these artists' practices and having no immediate thoughts on painting — an important reason why they were brought together. I am glad we persevered because what followed was a series of engaging weekly online studio visits, from quarantine in London to various locations including in Kochi, Trivandrum, Baroda and Rotterdam where these artists are based. 

While I missed the full experience of going into the studio, meeting in person, and having a direct encounter with the work, I appreciated a technology, which meant that without traveling I was still able to learn more about these four artists and their relationship to the medium of painting. And what follows is a series of short excerpts from our conversations.

The 4 painters will be profiled in 4 Online Viewing Rooms, beginning with Trivandrum-based Ratheesh T. (born 1980).  

In the work of Ratheesh T. the visual worlds of Kerala have been consciously reduced to a series of portraits, principally of himself, as well as images of his studio and its immediate surroundings in Trivandrum where he lives and works. The elimination of surplus elements in his practice gets chronicled in the painting ‘I am (Cleaning Pond)’ (2015) where a jumble of clothing has been discarded leaving the artist naked, while behind him the walls crumble away to reveal a scene in which mechanical diggers extract weeds from the pond behind his studio — an image which is at once metaphorical and taken from life. He describes himself as ‘not telling big stories’, not plucking images from the air, but detailing what is happening right here ‘in my small life’. As we speak, he moves the camera to show his studio balcony with its high wall, which in a double portrait currently underway, sees him jumping up in order to see over to the pond below.

Grant Watson is an independent curator based in London. He holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London. He was Senior Curator at Iniva, London (2010-14), and Curator at MuHKA, Antwerp (2006-10), where he presented the large-scale exhibition “Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture" (2008), which addressed left politics and modernism in India. He was Visiting Curator for documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, where he researched the participation of contemporary Indian artists in the exhibition. Recent activities include 'bauhaus imaginista' a 3-year research project exploring the transnational character and reception of the Bauhaus with exhibitions and discursive events taking place in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the USA.