Collection: Akkitham Narayanan

Akkitham Narayanan (born 1930, Kerala) is an Indian painter based in Paris since the 1960s. Working between European modernism and the visual traditions of South Asia, he developed a practice that resisted assimilation into either. His encounter with Art Tantrique at Le Point Cardinal in 1970 — organised with editor Ravi Kumar and presenting manuscript pages and yantras rather than contemporary paintings — was, by his own account, formative: it helped him imagine a third route at the moment Neo-Tantra was beginning to emerge in India as a distinct tendency.

The printed matter gathered here documents his presence in the exhibition record and the broader context of South Asian modernism in Paris.