Portraits of an artist

Beyond Badami, a retrospective exhibition of the late JMS Mani’s work, offers a peek into the artist’s diverse, expansive repertoire

The bananas gleam out of the oil painting, the black-tipped golden fruit pulsating with as much life as the people in the picture: a turbaned man in white with a parrot perched on his shoulder and a lithe woman in a pink blouse and green sari, a large red bindi on her forehead. The artwork, one of the several being displayed at the KYNKYNY art gallery as part of a retrospective exhibition of the late JMS Mani’s work titled Beyond Badami, is a classic from his Badami series, unsurprisingly, the artist’s most popular body of work.

The artwork’s bright colours and stunning impasto technique, almost post-impressionist in style, effortlessly capture the essence of that ancient town. Located in Karnataka’s Bagalkot district, Badami made a great impression on the artist back in 1975, when he first visited the town, introduced to it by his teacher, RM Hadapad, the founder of the Kuvempu Kala Sanstha Ken School of Art.

“He was deeply inspired by the lifestyles of the people of Badami, by how simple and colourful it was,” says his daughter, Ranjitha S, pointing out that the town inspired her father to create countless works. “People started liking this series, so he started working more on that,” says Ranjitha, adding that her father, who started off his art career painting signboards, went on to become a teacher and later, principal at the Ken School of Art.

While several paintings from the vibrant Badami series are on display at the gallery, the retrospective moves far beyond it, offering a peek into the artist’s diverse, expansive repertoire. From mixed-media artwork made from candy wrappers, used paint tubes, waste canvas and old photographs to etchings, large abstract landscapes and some incredibly tender mother-and-child compositions, Beyond Badami offers a glimpse into the life and work of an incredibly prolific artist who was “always searching, and saw an opportunity in everything,” as Vivek Radhakrishnan, the co-founder of KYNKYNY points out.

According to Radhakrishnan, at any given time, JMS Mani’s repertoire embodies consistency, which was the Badami series; exploration, the smaller abstract works that he created with whatever he found lying around; passion, his larger abstract landscapes; and documentation, his daily sketches that told stories of life in his immediate surroundings and home. “He had no restrictions and wasn’t bound by any rules. This allowed him to think and create totally out of the box,” says Radhakrishnan.

This exhibition allows viewers to look into his mind and understand his thought process, believes Radhakrishnan, adding that its objectives are both to show the artist’s amazing versatility and connect the work back to the truly unique person that was JMS Mani. “This is a special exhibition, and a lot of heart has gone into curating it, as JMS Mani was a very special person to us,” he says. “We wanted to honour his memory, his work, his life, and his incredible breadth as an artist.”