Alex Mathew

Profile

Alex Mathew studied art in the College of Fine Arts,Trivandrum (1975-81),Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University, Baroda (1982-84), Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste (1986-87). He has participated in important exhibitions and workshops in India and abroad. His works are in the collections of significant public and private collections.He is currently on the teaching Faculty of the Sarojini Naidu School of Visual and Performing Arts, Central University of Hyderabad. Alex was one of the founding members of the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a collective of Marxist artists from Kerala. This group saw themselves as cultural workers playing an interventionist role in history. Their declaration to seek alternative ways of working and exhibiting sprung from their political ideology and manifested in an interrogation of what they saw as the mainstream artistic schools of the time. The importance of the group lay in provoking critical debate within the artistic community. At their first exhibition at The Faculty Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, (1986) where many of them were studying, they published a manifesto “Questions and Dialogues” in which they articulated their ideological stand. The second exhibition was held in their native state of Kerala. (Calicut, 1988.) Like his contemporaries in the group, Alex was influenced by the German Expressionist artists. While a student in the class of German sculptor Emil Cimiotti, he had the occasion to see original works of these artists as well as of famous Neo-Expressionists like Heckel and Kirchner. Johannes Brus, the well-known contemporary sculptor, was also a great influence. Alex Mathew is amongst India’s most significant artists