K. N. NARAYANA MURTHY

b. 1942 Hyderabad, India
d. 2025 Bangalore, india

WORKS   |   BIOGRAPHY   |   EXHIBITIONS

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

K. N. Narayana Murthy was born into a family of eleven brothers and four sisters. At a young age, Narayana Murthy began to gradually lose his hearing. Without a hearing aid, he has been virtually deaf for years. But this handicap did not cause him to despair. In fact, he saw it as an advantage. When he concentrates on his artistic work, he can turn off his hearing aid and immerse himself in the silence of the creative process. He needs this silence because his artistic activity is for him an almost mystical act - his service.

At the age of six, Narayana Murthy's fascination with symmetrical stains of color began. His father was a post office inspector, so he had access to paper and ink for stamp pads, and he experimented, deeply fascinated by the ever new and surprising results, with ink blots over which he folded the paper to create a random symmetrical pattern.

Early on, Narayana Murthy chose a peculiar acronym for his stage name: MaNaNi. It is an abbreviation of the first two letters in his native Kannada for his name Narayana, bracketed by two terms meaning "psychic" (manovaignanika) and "hidden" (niguda). For he sees himself as an artist who transports mystical, hidden contents of the human soul through his art. To do this, he uses the random arrangement of color stains, which become symmetrical forms by folding the paper. With an alert higher sense, he recognizes visionary forms in the blotches that he involuntarily creates, and with a few sparing additions, he frees the form from indeterminacy.

For Naryana Murthy, many of his works are mystical manifestations of Hindu deities, symbolic and allegorical set pieces from the religious life of the Hindus, scenes from the great epics of his homeland, the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, but Christian symbols also play a role. Sometimes they are just representations of animals, people and fantastic creatures. All these emerging forms come to him without any conscious intervention on his part. He regards himself as a channel for the manifestation of a transpersonal reality.

Narayana Murthy has experimented with many different painting media. For most of his early works from the 1960s to the 1980s he used oil paints. In the late 1980s, he began to work with printing inks, mixing various other materials such as colored pigments or fine granite powder for texture, called "rangoli" as Hindus use it to sprinkle the traditional patterns on doorsteps daily.

Narayana Murthy worked as a mechanical engineer for Hindustan Aeronautics and took early retirement in 2000. Since then until he died, he spent all his free time creating his mysterious paintings.

EXHIBITIONS

2019 Maayamaya, Retrospective exhibition, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore, India, November 2019
2017 Elysium, Galerie für spirituelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany, 8/31/2017 – 10/21/2017
Since many years Narayana Murthy exhibits privately at one of Indias biggest day-long art fair, the Chitra Santhe, held yearly in January in his home town Bangalore, India.