T.V. Santhosh

Deeply engaged with the dark side of human history and current events, T.V. Santhosh investigates “the history of violence and terror” worldwide in his lurid, large-scale paintings and mixed-media sculptures. Santhosh paints and sculpts what he sees, working from images in the news and re-creating them with the effect—brilliant greens, oranges and yellows—of a color photograph negative. Shaped by his underlying concern with our often-destructive definitions of progress and nationalism, he explains: “I have been questioning the so-called notions of ‘progress and its side effects’ evolving around the complex idea of ‘enemy and nationhood.’” In Stitching an Undefined Border (2007), for example, Santhosh uses acid greens and white-hot oranges to paint a bearded, older man working at a sewing machine, calling into question how, where, and with whom borders begin and what, in the end, they divide.