Akkitham Narayanan

Narayanan trained at the Government College of Fine Arts in Chennai under K.C.S. Paniker, and was among the founding participants of Cholamandal Artists' Village in 1966, the institutional hub of what became the Madras Movement. Where the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group looked to European modernism as a wholesale model, the Madras group sought an indigenous South Indian idiom rooted in local tradition. For Narayanan this meant Neo-Tantrism: geometric abstraction derived not from Mondrian or Constructivism but from the cosmological symbolism of triangles, squares, and circles corresponding to the classical Indian elements.

His technique is what he calls "calculated accidents." He spends months on preparatory drawings, then executes the final canvas in three to four days of intensive, intuitive work, applying thin oil paint in layers, merging them with large brushes, removing excess with a palette knife to create a luminosity closer to watercolour than oil. While the paint is still wet he etches lines and inscribes text from the Rig Veda with a knife blade, making scripture into mark rather than legible inscription.

Since his retrospective at Jehangir Art Gallery in 2025, which organised six decades of work as a constellational field rather than a chronology, critical attention has returned to his place within Indian modernism. Works are held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Paris, and museums in Germany, Japan, and Poland.