India’s influential abstract artist Achuthan Kudallur passes away, aged 77

Based in Chennai, the Kerala-born painter was a significant force in India’s contemporary abstract art movement, and also a quiet mentor to many

Achuthan Kudallur was endearingly grouchy on the phone. He called intermittently and hung up abruptly, forgoing superfluous niceties for disarmingly honest conversations on family, art and life. Not surprisingly, the reclusive artist who passed away on Monday morning at a hospital in Chennai, is mourned by a large group of friends, family and fans. 

He will be remembered for his prodigious talent, of course. Aged 77, Kudallur was a significant force in India’s contemporary abstract art movement. A writer-turned-painter, his luminous canvases, pulsating with colour, drew international attention to the Madras Art Movement in the 1970s. He won multiple awards, including the Tamil Nadu Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1982 and the National Academy Award in 1988 and exhibited his work widely, both nationally and internationally.  

He is also remembered for his unexpected patience and willingness to mentor talent — from hopeful young artists and gallerists to his staff’s children, whom he dotingly allowed to run amok between his canvases at his house by the sea in Thiruvanmiyur.

For an artist seen as temperamental and brusque — a persona he never bothered to contest — Kudallur was also sensitive, empathetic and kind, though he attempted to hide it behind a gruff demeanour and dark sense of humour. 

Artist C Douglas, from Cholamandal Artists’ Village, says it is these facets of his personality that make his work so impactful. “Like him, his canvases have layers and layers, not one single mass of colour,” he says.  

Douglas talks with admiration of how the painter balanced local and meta narratives in his work: “Though his work is abstract, there is universality to it, because its his personal expression. His art has a clarity that touches the world, somehow.” 

Born in 1945, in Kudallur village, Kerala, Kudallur’s work is deeply influenced by an idyllic childhood, swimming in the Bharathapuzha and Kunthipuzha rivers that intersected beside his childhood home. He moved to Chennai in 1965, to study civil engineering, where he joined evening classes at the Madras Art Club in Government College of Fine Arts.