Venkat Shyam

“I wrap your name in mine

I’m mixing weed with wine

I’m the dot, you’re the line

I’m the name, you’re the sign”

(Excerpts from Ganja-Mahua Chronicles by Venkat Raman Singh Shyam & S. Anand)

Perhaps few can pen down their life’s work, and even fewer who can draw it. Venkat Raman Singh Shyam has achieved both. With his unique totemic style of painting which Hervé Perdriolle, an eminent art critic, had called “entirely free from academism yet surprisingly mature and self-assured.” Venkat Shyam trodded the path that his uncle Jangarh Singh Shyam had paved. Born in 1970, he comes from the Pradhan Gond community where he learned the art of murals, etchings, mixed media, and later even animation. He is a recipient of the ‘Rajya Hasta Shilpa Puraskar’ and has exhibited in India as well as abroad such as in the exhibition Painted Songs & Stories, curated by John H. Bowles in 2010 in the U.S.A. His works are currently in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art.