Objects like cigarette packets, a toy car, or even an alarm clock are easy to overlook in daily life. For CK Rajan, however, these are not insignificant things; they are the symbols of everyday life and nostalgia, as well as tools through which he represents the many social realities.
The exhibition, titled ‘Rajan One’, brings together over three decades of CK Rajan’s work to Delhi at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, where it will run till May 16.
Curated by Grant Watson, the exhibition is the first part of a two-part retrospective that spans works made between 1989 and 2022. It offers insight into his ideas and surreal visual language, while also addressing various social and political realities.
The idea of utopia
Born in Kerala in 1960, Rajan studied art in Thiruvananthapuram, Baroda and Hyderabad. His career took shape in the late 1980s, when he got associated with the Kerala Radicals group, an ’80s Left-leaning art collective that rejected art commercialisation, and focused on the works that would reflect the lives of the poor. Although the group was short-lived, its influence can still be felt in Rajan’s work, which often carries a persistent political charge.
One of the earliest series on display is In Search of Utopia (1989–90). These are small paintings made on the inside of discarded cigarette packets. In the book Seekrajan — comprising curated artworks of the Rajan — Watson describes the series as the “bohemian life of the artist’s studio”. The tiny artworks feature various vast spaces like cityscapes, observatories, and stadiums, as well as objects like fruits and vegetables, kitchen knife, an aeroplane — some drawn as silhouettes with sharp shadows. The artworks seem abstract, until the small human figures come into notice; the abstraction then seems “peopled by figures who seem alienated from their particular utopia”.
Liberalisation, and everyday change
The most striking section of the exhibition is ‘Mild Terrors’. Produced between 1992 and 1996, it is a series of collages that brought Rajan wider recognition. These small compositions are made using precise cuttings from newspapers and magazines, assembled with a careful attention to detail.
“Here collage becomes the work of a surgeon making precise cuts that puncture the surface of ideology and habit,” the curator writes. These works reflect a rapidly changing India of the 1990s— a time when the country’s economy was opening up but which also brought in its wake a consumerist culture, a flood of global brands, media expansion, and diverse aesthetic choices—and its subsequent imprint on the Indian middle-class imagination. In 1991, India underwent major economic reforms, often referred to as ‘economic liberalisation’.
The works, thus, reflect the shifting aspirations. The collages bring together fragments of this changing visual culture — advertisements, “aimed at a burgeoning middle class”, sit next to scenes of labour; cut-outs of pills and capsules are placed onto landscape scenes; an Indian airline appears set against what looks like a European setting.
The works suggest that liberalisation marked an economic change while also influencing how people perceived and understood their surroundings. The media was flooded with new visuals — full of glossy polished advertisements, aspirational lifestyles, and global references that gradually altered how people viewed everyday life.
The exhibition also includes notebooks and archival materials that give a glimpse into the artist’s methods. According to gallery director Ranjana Steinruecke, Rajan’s later works — including a set of paintings and a series of tabletop sculptures of coloured boxes containing everyday objects such as a clock, a knife, and a toy car —will be presented in the second part of the exhibition, scheduled for August this year.
Steinruecke points out that Rajan’s collages are not only acts of critique but also explorations of visual beauty. She notes that the artist “didn’t need to do anything on a grand scale,” choosing instead to communicate through small, meticulously constructed works. The hundreds of collages, when seen together, create an immersive experience, and draw viewers into Rajan’s way of seeing, where each piece is as much about composition as it is about meaning.