Painter, curator, collector and installation artist: multiple roles come easy to the indefatigable Bose Krishnamachari

He’s just back from the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, where his Ghost/Transmemoir installation was part of a cutting-edge group show, Gateway Bombay, curated by Susan Bean and Beth Citron. But there’s no room for jet lag. In his Borivili studio, Bose Krishnamachari, 44, is painting a new canvas for an upcoming group exhibition while fielding calls, unpacking his cargo of books and catalogues and sipping coconut water to keep up with the crazy pace.

Up ahead are shows in Milan, a group exhibition in Paris, a solo in London AICON, another group show in Vienna hosted by Swarovski, and an offer to curate a big show for the Amsterdam India Festival, not to mention the planned solos, group shows and curator projects around in the country.

The little plastic globe on his desk isn’t obviously out of place. “Travel is the best form of education,” says Bose about his upcoming whistle-stop trips. One wonders how it feels to be both a curator and an artist. “Being a practitioner of the arts, I feel I am in a position to curate with the sort of depth that a lot of the so-called curators of today aren’t doing,” says the painter who made a statement with his first curated show Bombay X 17 in 2003. “Bombay X 17 created a link between Mumbai and Kerala. It was followed by Double Enders, where Kerala artists came to Mumbai and shared their works,” he says.

With his latest venture Spy, at The Guild Art Gallery, featuring four upcoming young artists, Bose looks at the human tendency to be voyeuristic through the works of C. K. Rajan, Dia Mehta, Prasad Raghavan and Simrin Mehra. “Spy is an interdisciplinary show that brings photography, painting, advertising and fashion designing,” says Bose.

Despite the hectic workflow, Bose isn’t letting his own painting lag behind. “The current canvases are lager-than-life tributes to dabbawalas. Plans are afoot for my solo at Bodhi, where I am focussing on the media,” says the artist.

This is a project like Ghost that featured over 100 tiffin-carriers strung up on what looked like the inside of a local train compartment; this time it’s over 5,000 media logos on mikes. “It’s going to be like a Last Supper with world leaders at the table facing the mikes. The media invades your living room and can make or destroy public opinion,” says Bose.

Who was Bose before he became a phenomenon? A young artist from Kerala, he had already won a Lalit Kala Akademi award when he landed in Mumbai in 1985, with a few leads, loads of talent and a yen to make it big. JJ School of Art initially denied him entry on the grounds that he was already an established artist. “I was determined to get in. I stayed in a Saki Naka chawl, sharing a flat in shifts with a cousin and ten other bachelors. I made portraits for a living at the Mela Restaurant in Worli in the mornings,” recalls the artist.

JJ School relented in 1986 and he enrolled for his Bachelor in Fine Arts. Bose found himself drawn into circles that had a senior like Akbar Padamsee, the contemporaneous Sudarshan Shetty and the younger Riyas Komu. “It was good to have stimulating people around. It inspired me,” says the painter.

Being the topper in his batch, he also had a stint as a teacher at JJ under a Bombay University scholarship. However, when Bose organised a SAHMAT workshop on the campus, he spoke about the changes that he wanted to see at JJ School. “They found it untenable that I had spoken out and critiqued them and I was asked to leave in 1992,” he recalls. That only proved to be a minor setback since he was awarded a scholarship from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Stylistically Bose has traversed the entire gamut of modern and contemporary art— from photo-realism and portraits, to a popish usage of found images from the media. He has experimented with billboards, furniture, public art, his own brand of abstraction and later in his career, with large-scale installation projects.

Bose is appalled at the apathy of Indian museums towards contemporary art. “Some of them run like commercial galleries with shows running only for a week,” he bemoans. “My dream is to build two museums in Kochi and Mumbai, where I will showcase my personal collection and also invite collectors from the world over. I have bought land in Kerala and am lobbying for a spot in Mumbai.”

For now there is Bose’s adda in his basement adjoining his studio, which is thrown open to young artists and contemporaries to access his vast collection of books and DVDs. “We will have screenings of films, discussions and workshops. My home used to be an adda of sorts. I’m glad I have a new space for it.”

Looking at the glossy spines of the tomes that currently lie in the cardboard boxes, one does wish that he gets all the space that he wants, since he is more than willing to share his goodies with the rest of the art world.