Return of the Shapeshifter

MOST CENTENARY retrospectives are em­balming rituals under spotlights. The dead artist is taxidermied in white cubes, puffed up in catalogues, and offered up to the gods of art history as a neutralised genius. No smoke. No fire. But that’s not what Nancy Adajania is up to with One Hundred Years and Counting — Re- Scripting KG Subramanyan, the second and expanded iteration of the show, with 270 objects, including artworks and archival images, currently running at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru. If anything, she has done the opposite: exhumed the artist, pried open his theatrical cabinet of creatures, and let them tumble across the gallery like uninvited guests from the afterlife. There are toys. There are silhouettes. There is a cow with wings. There are gods and women. And in the middle of it all, a boy named Robby from KG Subramanyan’s (KGS) 1972 eponymous children’s book appears not just on the gallery wall but as the the­matic wormhole through which the entire retrospec­tive tumbles. “But I can be more still / Like the ant in the anthill / Like the bird in the birdcage.. / Spiky-spoky hedgehog / Gawky-walky camel / Do you think it is funny / For one to be so many?”

The poem is everything Adajania wants this show to be: playful and eerie, childlike and tragic, a manifesto of shape­shifting as both cultural inheritance and psychological weight. Robby doesn’t just echo KGS—he is KGS. The boy made of many names, many forms, many affili­ations. Originally, Adajania had wanted video projections of these creatures populating the gallery space like spectres. When the logistics proved daunting, she let giant black cutouts do the talking.

The Bengaluru edition is not simply a restaging of the Kolkata show from last year. It is, to use Adajania’s words, an “amplification”. New works—Girl with Cat Boy, Chinnamasta, the Jincheng Hotel drawings from China, early 1960s abstracts—are drawn from private col­lections and museums. “I wasn’t looking to present a different thesis,” she tells me, “but to deepen the one we already had: that KGS was a pluralist, a bahurupi, a trickster-craftsman whose work defied the purity of dogma or genre.”

The centrepiece of this recalibration is a blown-up detail from his 2009 Santinik­etan mural Black and White—a mythic creature Adajania describes as “a hybrid of Kamadhenu (the celestial wish-ful­filling cow in Hindu myth) and a Buraq (the winged steed that takes the Prophet on his mystical journey in Islam)” that hovers as a rebuke to the present. It hangs above the visitor like a mythological traffic controller—cow-faced, winged, uddered and cosmi­cally alert. “I chose it to reaf­firm our belief in religious confluence,” Adajania writes in the wall text, “in a time when we are punished for be­ing multiple.” Her language, deceptively calm, hides a sharpness: it is not simply that multiplicity is beautiful, but that it is punished.

This is also implicit in the pairing of Divinity (2007), KGS’s flamboyant rendering of Lord Subrahmanya, and The Tale of the Talking Face, a visual fragment from a children’s book turned political indictment. The first is a portrait of control—Subrahmanya, god of war, painted as “an androgynous showstop­per”, composed of multiple heads, his arms arranged in balletic symmetry. The second is a scene of collapse: a puppet-queen0, arms flailing, her body folding in on itself. The poem that accompanies her ends with a line of withering clarity: “She did not have the courage / to put aside the costume / and all that came with it.”

“This figure,” Adajania tells me, “was chosen as the keynote image of the show. It is a critique of authoritarian rulers, espe­cially those who believe their rule will last forever.” And yet, in placing it opposite Subrahmanya—which, in Adajania’s reading, is also a self-portrait—we are not simply being shown opposites. “Subrah­manya is celibate and philosophical, but also the commander of divine armies. He is what KGS saw himself as: the guardian of artistic multiplicity, the one who keeps chaos from closing in,” Adajania says. The placement of these two works on the same axis—one falling, one watching— becomes a spatial diagram of interior and exterior dissent.

The logic of adjacency—situating KGS’s artistic imagination in its larger contexts—is Adajania’s primary curatorial tool. Shadowgraphy footage next to silhouettes, toys adjacent to Abanindranath Tagore’s forgotten sculp­tures, and the shape of a seed bursting like a vulva next to an animal carcass. And in the same spirit, we find, along­side rare canvases and photographs of murals, archival notes, design studies, and, crucially, the detritus of pedagogy— KGS’s scribbles, diagrams, mock-ups for children’s books and letters.

The same ethos governs the quieter moments in the show: the suspended Jincheng Hotel drawings from KGS’s trip to China in 1985, for instance, hung on acrylic like windows in a room bathed in light. Here we see a man seated with a cane, a woman selling eggs, a child peering through a doorway. “These drawings compose a micro-history of a country in transition,” Adajania writes. “KGS avoids the spectacle of reform-era China. He attends to village life, manual labour, fleeting moments of exhaustion.” The Jincheng Hotel images therefore become an archive of what Raymond Williams called “a structure of feeling”: the murmur of a society reorganising itself, captured not in its declarations, but in its pauses.

If KGS had nine lives as an artist— painter, muralist, toymaker, writer, designer, ideologue, teacher, satirist, printmaker—Adajania isn’t content to string them together. She lets them bleed into each other. Her hang isn’t chronological. It is psychological, and political.

KGS WAS CULTURALLY amphibious. Born in 1924 in Kerala to a Tamil Brahmin family, he was raised in Mahe, a French colony where language, culture, and colonial legacies coexisted. His parents were Tamil migrants. He moved fluidly between Malayalam and Tamil, between high Brahmin education and the boister­ous theatres of street life.

There is a black-and-white photo of him from 1969, preparing for the Fine Arts Fair. He is crouched over a stencil, sleeves rolled up, mid-cut. The wall label tells us he was a “late child of ageing parents”, deeply attached to his mother, and that his passion for handicrafts came from her. This passion extends to his toys—wooden, riveted, leather-sad­dled creatures that could be anti-design artefacts. His toys are not supplemental to the exhibition. They are central. They embody his belief that the distinction between “high” art and “applied” art is a colonial fiction—and that to teach is also to make, to play is also to critique.

There are biographical film clips and photographs scattered throughout the show. KGS speaking—about Mahe, about art, about Gandhi. About his refusal to draw clean lines between craft and modernism. About being more interested in how things are made than what they mean. Adajania’s curatorial wall texts are not explanations—she provokes, ques­tions, leaves us unsettled. She shows the gouache of Chinnamasta—the goddess who severs her own head to feed others— and asks: is this liberation, or is it a “projec­tion of male sexual fantasies”? In one painting—a blue-skinned woman and her lover framed by petal-like forms—she writes that “the artist is projecting a beam of empathy onto the couple. That beam, in turn, bounces off onto his viewers.” These conversations are not just formal or historical—they are ideological. They concern the optics of power and gender, the contours of dissent, the long afterlife of modernism in postcolonial pedagogy. And they are staged with an intelligence that refuses neat timelines or academic voice. The show, much like KGS himself, thinks by leaping.

Take for instance the collages of KGS’s children’s book How Hanu Became Hanu­man (1995) that Adajania found during her research at the Seagull archive. “I chose to show these mockups rather than the printed books to invite the viewer into the artist’s laboratory as it were—to witness the magic of making. Humble materials like brown and black chart paper cutouts are transformed by the maestro’s hands into a choreo­graphed dance of sharp, swift rhythmic movements. But I also provide a feminist critique of KGS’s account of this epic superhero. KGS narrates the tale as a rollicking Hindi film yarn, replete with a helicopter chase and a disco on a remote island. However, I argue that this Hindi film template also means the reinforce­ment of patriarchal stereotypes such as the damsel in distress—even if she has a black belt in the martial arts—who needs rescuing from the bad guys,” Adajania says.

And then there’s the research. Letters to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, fibres from the Weavers’ Service Centre, a 1962 issue of Marg, shadowgraphy from Prasanna Raghava Rao—KGS’s fellow student who performed silhouettes of world leaders at the Non-Aligned Summit while Nehru and Tito looked on like bemused parents at a school play. This anecdote alone might be one of the best art-histori­cal mic-drops of the decade.

ADAJANIA ALSO highlights the works of four women artists— Mrinalini Mukherjee, Nilima Sheikh, Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N—in the show, who were inspired by KGS’s ideas about working across mediums and historical periods. “Pushpamala’s early terracotta and plaster-of-Paris sculptures were influ­enced by KGS’s terracotta reliefs and his glass paintings, which brimmed with wit, irony, mischievous humour and bore the impress of everyday life. In the show, the viewers will be delighted to encounter rare images of Pushpamala’s sculptures from the 1980s. And yet, I would argue that when you look at Pushpamala’s representa­tion of adolescent girls and women, you know that her approach to the subject of female sexuality is radically different from that of KGS,” Adajania says.

If there is a critique to be made, it is that the show occasionally risks curatorial over-interpretation. But Adajania is one step ahead of that too. She frames her readings as “multiva­lent”, not sovereign. She calls them “critical annotations” rather than con­clusions. Even the word “rescripting” avoids the tyranny of “redefining”. She is not rewriting KGS. She is directing his afterlife. And perhaps that’s the only way to handle a figure like KGS in 2025. Not as a frozen genius, but as a working contradiction. A trickster-pedagogue. A maker of toys and murals and mytholo­gies. A man whose canvases flirt with power and whose silhouettes mock it. A performer who became his mask, and still somehow managed to wink through the paper.

(One Hundred Years and Counting: Re-Scripting KG Subramanyan, curated by Nancy Adajania is on display at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru, till May 20)

art ExhibitionBengaluruKarnataka Chitrakala ParishathKG SubramanyanNancy Adajania