Artist Unnikrishnan C and the chance he built his dream on

Me, Amma, We, an exhibition of works by artist Unnikrishnan C and his mother Devu Nenmara, is currently underway in Bengaluru

More often than not, rags-to-riches stories leave readers inspired, but in the case of artist Unnikrishnan C, stronger emotions are stirred. Hailing from Nemmara in Kerala’s Palakkad, the artist is exhibiting his works as well as those painted by his mother, Devu Nenmara, at Gallery Sumukha in the city, and how they got there is nothing short of incredible.

“I was always good at art. That was something I knew about myself when I was in class I itself, but I never thought it could be a life choice,” says Unnikrishnan, talking from his home in Kerala. For the son of daily wage earners, a career in the creative field was out of the question. Unnikrishnan admits he was in high school before he even heard of a Fine Arts course.

“It was my art teacher Sushma Devi who saw my potential and urged me to pursue Fine Arts. She had graduated with a Fine Arts degree and would share what she had learnt. It fuelled my desire to study the same, but my parents were not supportive of this idea and I don’t blame them as I wasn’t good in any school subject, except for art. Besides, in my family none of us had studied past class X.”

Unnikrishnan too, may have stopped his studies at high school level if a class XII certificate was not one of the criteria to enroll for Fine Arts, which he eventually did at the Government College of Fine Arts Thrissur. “I honestly wasn’t too keen on studying but a desire to join a Fine Arts course and become an artist, kept me going,” he says, adding, that when he placed 10th at the entrance exam that year, there was no looking back thereafter.

Throughout his studies, Unnikrishnan would supplement the family income by taking up blue-collar jobs. He recollects how during a semester break, he was back home weighed down by the family’s struggles. “I felt the walls closing in on me as if to hear me pour out my problems and take them in. From that day on, I began to paint on each brick until by the time I reached final year the interior of our house was covered with art work.”

Unnikrishnan says he shared this with his mentor, Kavita Balakrishnan, who taught art history at college and she included this work as a video submission for an exhibition she was holding in Chennai. He replicated a similar work in college as part of his final year assessment where it was appreciated by Jitish Kallat and Bose Krishnamachari who included it at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014.

He was one of the youngest artists featured at the Biennale that year and that proved to be the turning point in Unnikrishnan’s life. His works at the Kochi Biennale earned him an invitation to the Sharjah Biennale in 2015 and so on until he had his first solo show in Switzerland hosted by art collector Richard Bloom in 2018.