Born in Kerala in 1951, C. Douglas is one of the most collected artists of the Madras Art Movement in India. 

C. Douglas’ works in this exhibition capture his journey from the 1990s until the last few years. The works from the 1990s mark the time when he had begun working on his characteristic grey works, influenced by German Expressionists. To him, this neutral colour represented a liminal state that embraced vulnerability over heroism and uncertainty over finality. 

Crumpled and coated with sand and grey pigment, these paintings have an inherent ‘slowness’ as the images, of lighthouses, fetal forms and nebulous figures, slowly emerge into view due to the way they catch light. Unhurried and muffled, his paintings have the quality of an echo where there is both a presence and an absence.

C. Douglas

Born in Kerala in the year 1951, C. Douglas is one of the most collected artists of the Madras Art Movement. He retains the essence of Kerala in the form of theories and words read during his boyhood and the story of an early encounter with existential literature. He attended Balan Nair’s school for a year. During the period, he met K Damodaran in Tellicherry. Consequently, he took admission in the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras (1971). He was in the ceramic section and he concentrated on terracotta and ceramic vases. He had a special place for K Ramanujam, whom he called an anti-hero during his years in college. He began spending his weekends at Cholamandal, hence he was in touch with Ramanujam. Ramanujam’s death in 1973, his shift from the Cholamandal Artist’s village to Germany where he was caught between the art and the real world, brought about a change in his outlook of his role as an artist and his responsibilities as a member of the family. Germany taught him the importance of painters like Paniker and Ramanujam through their lens. He was exposed to the world of Abstract Surrealism through several exhibition visits. He turned to figurative Abstractions in 1985 to 1995 and his works speak volumes on modernist poetry. He worked with paper, cloth, sand tea stain, and he would often walk on the paper, and crumple it in order to create a surface of his own. There is an assumption that the man with bandages on his head in the Douglas’ series, Missed Call (2008) is in actuality a self-portrait of the suffering he had endured. Douglas is a voracious reader of contemporary philosophy and poetry, and he believes the future of art lies in dialogue and reading.

The artist lives and works in Chennai.