At his ongoing mid-career retrospective, Sacred Spaces, artist V Ramesh explores the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, where bodies merge with landscapes, ancient myths acquire new meanings, and ordinary objects evoke the sacred. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition reveals the continuity underlying Ramesh’s evolving imagery. His early paintings of fishermen explored the liminal space between land and sea, life and death. His later works, featuring saints, mystics and mythological figures, return to the same questions about existence and the nature of reality. “When I painted fishermen, it was a way of questioning and exploring ideas of life and death,” he says. “Today, when I paint women poets or stories from mythology, I am still engaged with the same fundamental questions.”
Trained under Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jyoti Bhatt and Ratan Parimoo at MS University, Baroda, his shift towards allegory and devotion emerged from a desire to explore subjects largely overlooked in contemporary visual art. “I wanted to find a language which no other contemporary painter had tackled,” says the Vishakapatnam-based artist. “I found it in the idea of devotion.” Drawing on ancient manuscripts, cultural memory and traditional storytelling, Ramesh transforms familiar narratives into layered, evocative compositions that resist literal interpretation. Critic Sadanand Menon describes this approach as a “rebellious de-iconisation”, in which sacred imagery is invoked but never taken at face value.
Women mystics such as Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Akka Mahadevi, Lal Ded, and Andal recur in his work. Having rejected social conventions in pursuit of the divine, these poet-saints embody a radical independence that continues to fascinate him. His understanding of bhakti also embraces the relationship between spiritual longing and physical desire. “The boundary between the sacred and the erotic is often very thin, and sometimes it does not exist at all,” says the 68-year-old, describing devotion as an intensely human experience rather than an expression of religious dogma.
Inspired by a century-old copy of the Periya Puranam, Ramesh revisits the story not to illustrate its miraculous episodes but to explore perseverance, suffering and the struggle against injustice. “I see it as the story of someone striving to achieve something against all odds,” he says. His paintings return repeatedly to the marginalised, the seekers and those who challenge established boundaries.