A contemporary artist, Krishnaraj Chonat creates works across the media of installation, public art, painting and performance that address urbanisation and land use, environmental degradation and consumerism. Chonat uses an assortment of material — mostly found objects, electronic waste and consumer products — that echo industrial, urban and personal contexts in his installation works. His work juxtaposes material and form in unexpected ways to offer insights on and provoke consideration of critical contemporary issues in sometimes ironic and His works are part parody and part critique, serving also to suggest a simultaneous complicity with They also serve to simultaneously suggest a connection with and resistance to prevailing forces of change.

Born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Chonat completed his BFA from the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru in 1994 and a post-graduate diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda in 1996. Recurring themes in his work are the lifestyles and aspirations of the nouveau riche; the ramifications and politics of waste generation and disposal; indiscriminate housing development and their environmental and social impacts; the prefabrication of experience in a consumerist world. Materials and their formal and spatial disjuncture are key elements of his vocabulary, through which he expresses his concern for an increasingly individualistic world. Chonat’s observations of the aspirational and material pretensions of modern urban life and gentrification are reflected throughout his oeuvre.

In High (2001), Milk and Skin (2002) and LOW/HIGH (2002), faux-fur, leather and fake pearls are recurring motifs that serve as metaphors for undiscerning materialism. He elaborates on the theme and introduces a more immediate view in Private Sky (2007), which also expresses concerns for the natural environment in the face of indiscriminate housing development. Here, a model house in the branches of a tree, a fur-lined moon and a black mosquito (in stark contrast to the ‘pure’ whites of the rest of the installation) allude to habitat destruction, the inevitable incursions of nature into spaces of luxury, and the real-estate trend of hawking lifestyles in the form of ‘Southern Californian villas’ and ‘Venetian bungalows.’ He reiterates the theme of environmental destruction in The Tree (2008), using a dead, uprooted tree suspended by a crane above an old house in the once-green-but-now-denuded Barakhamba locality of New Delhi. He combines personal, sensorial memory — in the form of sandalwood soap — with jarring visuals of urban refuse, particular electronic waste, to present visual and allusive contrasts in My hands smell of you (2010, 2011). He carries on the discourse on changing urban and tourist landscapes in his multi-work installations Turquoise (2013) and The Catch (2013), where he returns to motifs such as fur and model houses, while also introducing symbolic objects such as diving flippers and sea creatures to illustrate the primacy of the visual rather than the emotional component in the tourist landscape. He explores the industrial landscapes in India with his works Sparrows don’t picnic with monkeys (2015) and Unified (2015). Through visual disjunctures, such as an office chair emerging out of the branches of a tree, he hints at a social apathy and indifference to environmental context.

Chonat has exhibited widely in India as well as abroad in solo as well as group shows. Some of his notable solo exhibitions are Sinister White (2002) at Sakshi Gallery, Bengaluru; Island (2007) by GALLERYSKE at Project88, Mumbai; My hands small of you (2010) and Lotus Eaters (2017) at GALLERYSKE, Bengaluru; and All Sunsets are Sunsets (2013) at Nature Morte, New Delhi. As part of group shows, his work has been featured in venues across the world, such as Lalit Kala Akademi, Bangalore; Devi Art Foundation and Latitude 28, New Delhi; Anant Art Gallery, Kolkata; Cymroza Gallery, Mumbai; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, to name a few. He has participated in residency programmes in Paris, New York and Switzerland.

As of writing, he lives and works in Bengaluru and is represented by GALLERYSKE.