BENGALURU: For over five decades, Prasanna has shaped Indian theatre with his sharp visual imagination and deep philosophical grounding. Now, the acclaimed theatre director and playwright brings that same creativity to the visual arts with his first-ever exhibition, “Playing with Life,” on view at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru, from October 30 to November 2.
Using an electronic pencil on iPad, Prasanna presents a series of striking monochrome prints that explore humanity’s entanglement with nature, technology, and violence. With white, grey and black strokes, each work begins from abstract shapes—“like how a child looks at clouds and finds figures in them,” he says—and evolves into layered narratives that bridge the theatrical and the visual.
“Essentially, I am trained to reconstruct gestures and postures, all taken from life, on to the body of an actor,” Prasanna explains.
“That’s how one plays in theatre. But how does one do so in the visual arts? Well, theatre or paper, music or literature—it is all the same, a matter of skill.”
Following his mentor Ebrahim Alkazi’s advice to “do one thing at a time as a beginner,” Prasanna decided to eliminate colour and work only with black and grey. “I have spent five decades skilling myself in theatre. In the visual arts, much less,” he writes. “So I focussed only on the black line and the black shape. Later, I felt bold enough to use grey.”
The works are deeply metaphorical—reflecting on contradictions between human ambition and ecological fragility, between progress and loss. Prasanna’s influences range from Chittoprasad and Kathe Kollwitz to KG Subrahmanyam and MF Hussain, all of whom mastered expression through line and form.
Each artwork in “Playing with Life” is available as a digital print, priced from Rs 7,000 onwards, with buyers also eligible for 80G certification.
Prasanna has deliberately kept the prices modest to make his art accessible while supporting a larger purpose — funding the Indian Institute for Educational Theatre (IET) in Mysuru, which he founded three years ago.
All proceeds from the exhibition will go toward building a corpus for the institute, dedicated to training actors and educators to use theatre as a tool for learning and social change.
As Prasanna puts it, “Creativity apart, the process of artistic creation is that of motivated construction. It is this that lifts a stroke, a sound, or a word from the mundane to the metaphorical.”
