Baiju Parthan (b. 1956)

Once a cartoonist with the Times of India Group Publications in Bombay, Baiju Parthan is also a scholar of comparative mythology and philosophy. These elements all greatly inform his work and his paintings posses a cohesive almost narrative quality despite their disparate origins. "As Parthan constructs his 'multi-tasking mythologies' and remix-iconographies from the pervasive flows of the global media, he confronts the boundary collapse which defines contemporary experience: the imperceptible merging of subjectivity with the worlds, maker with user, and human with machine. He does not celebrate this fundamental characteristic of the future that is already upon us; rather he recognizes it as the exponentially disruptive condition that it is." (R. Hoskote, Baiju Parthan- A Users Manual, Mumbai, 2006)