Long before Yusuf Arakkal’s canvases found their place in galleries across the globe, his life began with loss, escape, and an unrelenting hunger to express. Orphaned at the age of seven and sent away to a boarding school, he ‘fled’ from Kozhikode to Bengaluru as a teenager, not in search of fame — but emancipation.
On a quiet weekday afternoon, the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Kochi breathes with the soul of this man who saw the world not as it appeared, but as it truly felt. Yusuf, the late master of brooding canvases and silent cries, returns to Kochi — not in person, but through an overwhelming retrospective that feels more like a homecoming than an exhibition.
That journey — marked by struggle, survival, and the solitude of being unseen — etched itself permanently into his art. Yusuf’s figures were rarely whole. Often bald, genderless, hunched or expressionless, they stood like echoes of those society forgets.
“He always said that figure was himself,” says Sara Arakkal, his wife, lifelong collaborator and curator of his legacy. “He was not bald. He was not a woman. But he saw himself in all the disregarded.”
Over the next five decades, Yusuf would become one of India’s most compelling modern artists, not only for his technical brilliance but for his insistence on portraying the invisible. His subjects were migrants, daily-wage workers, refugees, crying children...They spoke not in slogans but in sighs. “He gave dignity to those who have none,” Sara says. “He painted their silences.”
Though his artistic core was forged in solitude, his career blossomed with recognition. After receiving his diploma in painting from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in 1973, Yusuf’s work would go on to be exhibited in New York, Paris, London, and Singapore. Among his many accolades are the National Award (1983), the Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi Award, and the Lorenzo de Medici Gold Medal at the Florence Biennale.
Yet to Sara, his greatest masterpiece wasn’t a particular painting, but the spirit behind them.
“His life was art. His breath was art,” she says. “He never did it for success. Even when we had nothing, he would still paint.”
He worked as a technician in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), but later quit the job to pursuit the creative calling. He was a sculptor, poet, and a thinker — a man who carried within him both machinery and mysticism. “There was something divine in him,” Sara reflects.
A homecoming
Now, years after his passing, Yusuf returns to Kerala through this deeply personal retrospective exhibition. Curated by Sara herself, it feels less like a display of art and more like a reunion.
“This is where he was born,” Sara says. “I wanted his friends, colleagues, and the people who knew him to experience his spirit again.”
On entering the gallery, one is met not with grandeur but with gravitas. The walls are lined with heavy, moody canvases where isolation hangs like fog.
At the entrance, one sculpture stands out: a rusted copper car that looks both futuristic and fossilised. “He made it from scrap,” Sara explains.
“He once worked with machines, and somehow, that never left his fingers.”
The car is a metaphor of sorts, of moving forward while holding onto history.
One of the most moved visitors to the gallery was K R Upendra, an adjunct professor, who teaches at Christ University and R V University in Bengaluru.
“I came all the way just to see this,” he says. “I didn’t know Yusuf Arakkal personally. But I know what it means to stand on a stage and show your inner scars. His work does that — without words.”
Upendra finds resonance between Yusuf’s art and the psycho-physical methods he teaches in theatre. “There’s a strange discipline to his chaos. A quiet rage,” he says. “He doesn’t just paint poverty. He paints its weight. Its stillness.”
He points to Yusuf’s powerful portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. “You don’t see these men as heroes here. You see them as humans,” he says. “Their tired eyes, their meditative pain — he makes you feel their exhaustion. That’s a different kind of tribute.”
The exhibition also includes pieces from Arakkal’s Cry of the Kite series, which captures a metaphorical child’s longing against a bleak sky, and his haunting ‘Christ series’, where suffering is rendered in an almost unbearable softness.
“He had tried many times to exhibit it in the Vatican, and I still carry that dream. One day it’ll happen,” says Sara. “He always felt Christ was the symbol of modern suffering. It’s not about religion — but resistance.”
Yusuf’s artistic legacy now continues through his son, Shibu Arakkal, a photographer and digital artist. “Art will live on,” Sara says. “Through us. Through everyone who walks through this gallery.”
It isn’t legacy alone that lingers at the retrospective. Yusuf Arakkal is here. In the shadows, in the colours, in the faces on canvas that watch you quietly as you walk past.
