Gallery BMB is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Delhi based artist, Prasad Raghavan.

Born in Kerala in 1968, Prasad Raghavan studied Graphic Design at Trivandrum College of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1991. He started his advertising career in 1991 and worked in agencies such as Contract Advertising and Ogilvy & Mather as art director. In 2003 he moved to Saatchi & Saatchi and focused on films, and won a Cannes Lions for directing an ad film for Sony Handy Cams.
 
In 2004, Prasad Raghavan resigned from Saatchi & Saatchi to start a film club, A:DOOR – “the world’s best movies, free”. This move marked a new beginning – designing posters based on his interpretations.
 
Prasad’s interest in cinema and posters helped him to think more about creating a set of works, which subscribed to the form of film posters but deflected the narratives to a new zone of meanings. In those works Prasad was focusing on the very ‘Idea’ of posters that combine image and text in order to encapsulate the essence of a larger narrative. In this sense one could say, Prasad is the initiator and practitioner of ‘Post-Poster Art’.
 
In the exhibition ‘Shot-Tilt’ Prasad borrows the title of the show from cinematic terminology. In a tilt shot, what a director does generally is to change the angle of perception from the conventional. With a tilt in the camera and angle of recording, the director can see the things in a new light/reality. Prasad plays both in the mundane and the transcended. Interestingly, when he titles his exhibition, he even tilts the norm of the cinematic jargon; instead of calling it a ‘Tilt Shot’, he calls it, ‘Shot-Tilt’.
 
In his works Prasad debates the Idea of desire and false promises. The artist elaborates - ‘We live in a society that constantly generates desire amongst human beings, transforming us into voracious, consuming subjects, the result of which is garbage and guilt. There are lots of false promises around us, and my Idea in these works is to analyze and understand these through the creation of ‘false icons’ and images of rubbish, sin and culpability.'
 
 
Considering the artist’s interest in world cinema, and in the ethical and aesthetical foundational structures laid out by the universal philosophy embedded in the Bible, Prasad’s works should be seen as the proclamations of an independent enquirer who makes ‘Christian religious allegory as a secular process of sociological inquiry into man's greed and ultimately annihilistic relationship with nature’.
Art critic, JohnyML observes in the catalogue essay: “Prasad Raghavan is an inspiring and inspired artist, who makes icons of freedom and belief. Both freedom and belief originate from an innate sense of doubt on things going on around the world. For Prasad, his doubts fall directly on to the false promises that the glittering world produces through billions of images. He understands that images and words together convey the essential to the people; but this essential is most often meant for the destruction of the human spirit. As an artist, Prasad critiques this essential by muting the images and words at regular intervals. He deflects the referent from its original intention by adding a new twist to its perception through his post-poster technique.”
 
Bose Krishnamachari, artist, curator and the director of Gallery BMB, who literally ‘found out’ Prasad Raghavan three years ago in Delhi says, “Prasad is one of those rare contemporary Indian artists, who look at the society through a very intimate philosophical stance. Instead of slipping into the modernist cocoon of self righteousness, Prasad comes out to face the world and catch it by its throat, through his direct and hard hitting visual and textual images. When I met him three years ago, I was surprised to see the clarity of this artist’s works. I have been promoting his works since then. He is already a part of a few international museum exhibitions.”