Kakkoor, Kerala, India

Born in 1957 at Kakkoor, Kerala. After a B.A. in sculpture from the College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, 1982 he did his M.A. in sculpture at M. S. University, Baroda (1984). The leftist and radical background in Kerala and the socio-political strife at the time of the Emergency shaped his sensibilities along with an awareness of disrupted traditional inheritance locally with its diverse ramifications as well as on the plane of received modernism and current international trends. Inspired by Ramkinker Baij and directly, German realist and expressionist figuration of the day, he did exaggeratedly naturalistic and then distorted figures of human vulnerability and disabling entrapment in wider situations. In 1989 Rimzon obtained an M.A. with distinction from the Royal College of Art, London where he studied on an In lakhs scholarship, after which he moved to New Delhi permanently. His idiom has imbibed in a unique manner elements of the Conceptual and Minimalist attitudes through which he pares down archetypal imagery in order to reach the core of things, rudimentary states and fine qualities of humanism. This allows for his basic shapes to induce multifarious associations, apparently opposing or unrelated, but eventually disclosing or rather indicating a reconstruction of meaning and values. Steering his sculptures arranged in an installation-like space and stimulated by discontinuities, suggestiveness and contradictions of size, colour, setting etc. he directs the viewer to a complex experience of his imagining mingled with that of the artist. He relies on indigenous classic art forms of aesthetic emotive and symbolic nature, along with personal, contemporary, even utilitarian ones. The approach is essentially post-modernist as well as essentially Indian at a time of cultural and social transition. His main motifs repeat in related configurations, their meaning dependent on context and titles' suggestion. Rimzon's later work rooted in specific classic forms, have a greater simplicity and immediate power. The Tirthankara-like figure of austerity and spiritual purity placed in a cosmic circle of swords or tools evokes the eternal duality of violence and materiality contra human aspirations. The earthen pot contains creative water as the mother and the fertile woman violated by a weapon or charged with energy, but it can also serve to denote the self and the practice of untouchability. The other steady motifs are the egg and the lover couple the generative forces and the house of sheltering and of the sacred. Rimzon's solo shows were held at Art Heritage, New Delhi 1991, 93, School's Gallery, Amsterdam 1994. The main participation's are: Seven Young Sculptures, New Delhi 1985, 100 years of Indian Art, National Gallery of Modem Art, New Delhi 1994, Art and Nature, New Delhi 1995, The Other Self, New York and Stadelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1995, 2nd Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane, Fire and Life, New Delhi 1996.

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