Rajendar Tiku (b. 1953) graduated from Sri Pratap College, Srinagar, where he founded the Sri Pratap College Artists' Association. Rajendar Tiku started his career at the Institute of Music and Fine Arts. He has received both the junior (1993–95) and senior (1997–98) fellowships of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Government of India. He is also a recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2013, the Government of India honoured Rajendar Tiku with the Padma Shri. (He received Gottlieb Foundation (New York) Individual Grant for advanced work in Sculpture in 2015. He has several solo exhibitions to his credit including Bharat biennial of Contemporary Indian Art; 7th and 8th Triennial, India.
Rajendar Tiku lives and works in Jammu.
Tiku’s practice brings out in tangible form, the seemingly intangible aspect of the silent and sacred imbedded in our civilizational life and tradition. Getting inspired from shapes of objects ranging from mundane ones located in our immediate surroundings, to the visual grandeur of monuments located in the trajectory of the timelessness. He perceives a quantum of images and symbols that seem to usher technical, intellectual and philosophical human endeavours into realm of the universal. His work with sculptures reflects on materialising those spatial and plastic relationships, which are fuelled with energy to transport us beyond the particularity of the structure, the physicality of the medium and the situational time frames into an area where environment of the aspirations is not only realised but enhanced also. Rajendar Tiku has also been credited with using Śāradā script, a dying script of the Kashmiri language.
The work at our exhibition is an easily comprehensible and yet strong symbol for the inherent human yearning to connect. To connect with fellow human beings, the surroundings, the nature, her mysteries and an immense potential to sustain and preserve. In order to indicate that this yearning is essentially pure and positive, the work has been conceived in white and gold as the most important factor, along with connecting and holding devices having a strong physical functional and visual presence.
The treatment by itself suggests the requisite effort needed for the establishment and the sustenance of a renewed culture based upon a harmonised and peaceful material, mental and spiritual connection.
Says Tunty Chauhan:
"Verbalizing sculpture is difficult, especially the kind where one does not have direct, particular and recognizable references. It is here that one needs to be more focused so as to arrive at a form that transcends its own material and dimensional limitations and attains a sufficient formal autonomy. As a result, the evolved-form generates its own space and establishes its presence which now may be called as its reality.
I think, the reality a work of art attains is sum total of what we see, react to, remember, think about, perceive and then together externalize these aspects as a concrete manifestation. The whole process, which may also be called the process of creativity, needs time — a period of gestation".
Says Rajendar Tiku:
"Man inherently yearns to return to the past. This yearning which is precisely termed as nostalgia all through the evolution of literature and art has proved to be a strong source of inspiration. I have grown up surrounded by strong tradition and cultural values reinforced by
some pristine landscape and even the lore associated with it. I have in this work tried to contemporarise the formal interpretation of above mentioned values and finally materialise all these in a simply comprehensible work called 'Moon washed bridge and the mystery lake’.
The depth underneath the bridge with a reflecting surface in the bottom aptly represents water in which one finds reflections as in water. The white marble bridge indicates the pristinity and purity necessary for a system that helps us to go across. The overall gold gilding is a treatment to indicate the richness of the form and the eternity of the concept it stands for."