Exhibition dates: 15–22 November 2026 Timings: 11 AM–7 PM Venue: Basement Gallery, IIC Annexe, New Delhi Description: The Imaginarium, a solo show by 13 year old artist Rudranil Mitra is a collection of his imaginative world in the form of ceramic sculptures, stoneware masks, drawings and paintings curated by Uma Nair. Rudranil Mitra, began speaking …
Exhibition dates: 15–22 November 2026
Timings: 11 AM–7 PM
Venue: Basement Gallery, IIC Annexe, New Delhi
Description:
The Imaginarium, a solo show by 13 year old artist Rudranil Mitra is a collection of his imaginative world in the form of ceramic sculptures, stoneware masks, drawings and paintings curated by Uma Nair.
Rudranil Mitra, began speaking his first words finally only when he turned 6 and a half. However he began drawing, shaping and moulding clay from 18 months of age. He continues to be significantly deficient in language and vocabulary as compared to his cohort even now, and was diagnosed with Autism, ADHD and significant language delay / impairment. Some of the early signs of making and lining up dough-balls, arranging toys in grids, mixing and arranging footwear gave his family an insight into his autism, but more profoundly revealed his tactile tendencies, deft fingers and even more vivid imagination with respect to ideas of composition. The hundreds of tiny early creations made with coloured play-dough, soon began becoming bigger and bolder, brimming with anthropomorphic details and otherworldly features. His father, recognizing his prowess with all things visual and sculptural, placed him in formal training with ceramics teachers Ambar and Monica Agnihotri. His teachers gave him an absolutely free hand to imagine and create, with only the occasional technical input to nudge him, and his output has been absolutely prolific in the last 4 years. Being a practicing landscape architect and sculptor, Rudranil’s father saw the early makings of a distinct formal and visual language and recognized ‘a formative body of work’ appearing. He began to meticulously document all of Rudranil’s ‘artistic and sculptural experiments’. More recently, Rudranil spent over 3 weeks at noted ceramic artist / sculptor Keshari Nandan’s studio in Jaipur and produced a prolific amount of output in stoneware. Rudranil continues to struggle with the regular subjects in school, barely scraping through in his academics year on year (except in mathematics and art, which he most loves and enjoys). He has somehow made it to Grade 8. But when he is creating with his hands, he comes into his own. The adults in his orbit are often wonder struck by the things he imagines and the ways in which he creates them. There are thousands of kids like this who struggle within the current normative education system, who are talented in ways their parents may not even be aware of. This entire idea of the exhibition evolved from this humble seed of a thought : to unshackle these unconventional children, and to let them flower in the way the universe actually intended them to.
Curator’s Note :
Rudranil Mitra born with autism and ADHD, was also born to draw and sculpt. Within his silent self he watches the world, and in his mind form animation sequences of the fantastic and macabre. In his classroom at Don Bosco School, he is plotting his next sculpture or sketch, stories far away from academic books and the syllabus. What happens next is a psychological distillation – of giving expression to what is not ordinary.
The sculptures are visuals of character poise and posture. He is constantly balancing character poise within the dynamics of struggles and contradictions formed from amplified emotions. The figurines have multiple heads and hands, many eyes, almost mythic expressions, the dynamics of Devatas and Rakshasas (gods and demons), often with multiple flaws all thriving in the absurdity of everyday living. Rudranil becomes an important artist to discover and watch out for, because his imagery is one that dances in the depths of his fertile mind, perhaps as equally during nights, as during day-dreaming afternoons. These stoneware ceramic sculptures have been created by him over the span of 6-7 years, following his love for animation films like Madagascar, Ice Age, The Bad Guys, Kung-Fu Panda and many more. The 12 stoneware masks in particular, created at ceramic master Keshari Nandan’s Jaipur studio MRID-CERA, are a testimony to his understanding aligned to tribal visual language and the pure grammar of the primitive.
Drawings for him act like punchlines of expression. Each image for him tells a story in one frame.
His paintings done on travels are an example of elegance, rare talent and refinement of the art of sketching and hunger for colour. He breaks down and reassembles subjects into anthropomorphic forms while continuously blending radical gestures that defy logic. His paintings on empty glass bottles as well as birds made of pencil shavings – tell us of love for creating along the paradigm of ‘small is beautiful’ and, the potential of art hidden away in everyday commonplace objects, waiting for that artistic mind to excavate and interpret.
As a curator it gives me great joy to unveil the kingdom of Rudranil Mitra at IIC this Children’s Day. This schoolboy holds in his little body inheritance as well as imagination.
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