Baiju Parthan was born in 1956 in Mumbai. He is a contemporary artist based in Mumbai, known for his intermedia works. While elaborating the workings of a mysterious inner universe through his paintings, Parthan has combined his painterly concerns with his explorations of cyberspace to produce a series of provocative, richly textured installations. He aims to generate fresh metaphors and symbols that have the potential to expand the range of meanings that we can wrestle out of life and reality.
The direction of his art took another twist after the artist got hooked to philosophy – the understanding of the self as perceived in the western and eastern ways of thinking. How you create art is defined by the way the self is organized. His quest to create is more to do with knowledge. “Every new bit of knowledge is never undone, he believes, and tries and transforms himself through learning how far one can extend oneself into one’s own self, one’s family, the society and the nation. Having lived in an inflated personal bubble, engrossed in his own worldly pursuits, he decided at some point that maybe he was not being fair to the rest of his life.”
The artist worked with traditional media like painting on canvas and shifted to sourcing materials from newspapers, television, internet along with ancient cosmological diagrams, scientific charts and satellite maps as well as new media which range from interactive programming based art, large scale lenticular prints on metallic surfaces. Both these areas pose their own challenges and also expand the scope of what he can do. Parthan addresses the blurring boundaries in modern life.
Parthan has exhibited widely in India and abroad. He lives and works in Mumbai.
