RASHMIMALA (b. 1975) is a Vadodara-based artist whose practice draws inspiration from, and interrogates, colonial botanical illustration, a genre that went hand-in-hand with the European imperialists’ fascination with the exotic. Rashmimala’s paintings focus, instead, on the commonplace – the humble and hardy wildflowers and weeds which grow unnoticed in our backyards, on dusty road-sides or burst out of crevices in the walls. These plants of the Ruderal species, which grow on waste ground or land despoiled by natural disasters or human activity, symbolize nature’s resilience and its ability to heal itself. Also, unlike the historical genre, Rashmimala’s plant paintings are neither representative nor idealized – she paints leaves discolored by age, with moth-eaten edges and marked by disease, with as much attention to visual detail and beauty as the 18th and 19th century artists did to scientific accuracy. Rashmimala’s paintings are overlaid with elements of text from archival documents – the Latin names of the plants appear alongside their English or vernacular moniker, for instance – which serve as citations to the tangle of historical ideas that have shaped the contemporary study of and attitudes to plants, and determined their economic and aesthetic value. Rashmimala geo-tags her plant portraits, locating them in a particular place and time, and a specific social, cultural, ecological and economic context.

Rashmimala obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Painting in 1998 and 2000 and later completed her Master’s in Art Criticism in 2002. Both from M. S. University of Baroda. Her solo exhibitions, off the ground, at The Guild Art Gallery Alibaug in 2022, Where Should The Plants Sleep After the Last Breath of Air? An online solo project hosted by The Guild Art Gallery Mumbai in 2021 and transplant at Nazar Art Gallery, Vadodara in 2018 focused on representing minor local plants along the genre of botanical illustrations, natural history documentations and historical anecdotes. Some of Rashmimala’s recent participations include Past-Present-Continuous, 25 Years of Guild, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2022), India Art Fair (2022), Abu Dhabi Art (2021), Voices from the Courtyard, Baroda, for Womanifesto 2020, at Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial (2020) (organized by Art Museum of Guangzhou, Research Center for New Art Museum Studies and Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts), Notes, Documents & Processes, an online exhibition at Hyderabad Literary Festival (2021), and Mindful Circulations, curated by Kerstin Winking, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2019).

Rashmimala has participated in several camps and also regularly conducts workshops, the latest being a Cyanotype Workshop for the Artist’s Collective Remembering Nasreen in Baroda, (2022). Besides her art practice, Rashmimala has worked on extensive archiving projects of artists such as Jyoti Bhatt and Nilima Sheikh.

She lives and works in Vadodara.

Vasudevan Akkitham’s painterly practice can be placed firmly in the figurative-narrative tradition of the Baroda School. Stylistically, his works manifest the influence of pre-modern Indian painting traditions and the School of London figurative painters of the 1980s – Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Balthus, Philip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, etc. Human figures and animals appear in his canvases, framed against the backdrop of interior spaces, or natural landscapes which are taken from memory. While his imagery is simple, there is a mysteriousness inherent in the way the elements are distributed, and appear displaced from their traditional milieu. The result is an ambiguous narrative that hints at larger concerns about the relationship of man and nature, society and identity, etc. For all their seemingly social ‘content’, however, the minutiae of reality is of less importance in Akkitham’s works, than the use of poetic infusion and ‘the attempt to transport feeling’. ‘The presence of the unseen vision is as important as what is painted,’ he has said.

Akkitham was born in 1958 in Kerala, the son of acclaimed Malayali poet Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri, and studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda, where the eminent painter Gulammohamed Sheikh was his teacher, followed by a stint at the Royal College of Art, London. Vasudevan himself spent his entire life in academia – he joined his alma mater as a lecturer in the painting department in 1990 and retired as head of the department in 2021.