Image Credit - India Art Fair * Lakshmi Madhavan
Lakshmi Madhavan is a conceptual artist who uses Kerala's textile tradition to weave a thread between the present and the future. As an artist, Lakshmi continually changes her mediums and methods as her environment changes. The artist expresses her thoughts on a human body, especially a woman's body, and how it expresses, celebrates, or defies social and cultural norms, through drawing, textiles, and large-scale installations.
Lakshmi started her career working for a corporation rather than as an artist. After moving to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2015, she turned to art once again, a childhood passion, and used it to express her feeling of alienation in a foreign place. The artist claims "art saved me in so many ways." Motivated by urgent questions about her brown body's place in the world, and inspired by other feminist artists such as Mona Hatoum and Louise Bourgeois, the artist's earlier "doodles" evolved into artworks on paper based on anatomy and discovered object assemblages, through which she discovered a vocabulary of questioning identity and gender politics.
At the Summer Academy in Salzburg, she completed her apprenticeship under the German artist Bernhard Martin. In Mumbai, she was mentored by modern Indian artist Jitish Kallat. She gained a better understanding of the various perspectives surrounding the portrayal of the human body throughout history after working with French artist Nicolas Menard at the Louvre in Paris.