Indianapolis Artist
Member since December 10, 2007Bio
About Chitra Ramanathan
Web site: http://www.chitraramanathan.com
Trademark:
* Artist Chitra Ramanathan's extensive body of paintings portraying happiness as a visual entity with a formless form through unique abstract figuration with intense colors and variety of found texture materials
* The artist's mixed-media paintings on and behind Plexiglas and anodized aluminum
Biography:
Born in Thiruvananthapuram, India, Chitra Ramanathan is a contemporary Indian American visual artist and educator. She produces predominantly large scale abstract conceptual mixed media paintings, drawings, prints, site-specific installation works, and sculpture that have been exhibited in art galleries in SoHo, Broadway Manhattan, New York, solo exhibition at the ARC Gallery Educational Foundation at Chicago, and more recently a 2006 solo retrospective exhibition of her body of work at the Indianapolis Artsgarden, Circle Center, Indianapolis.
Several of her colorful mixed media paintings are owned by individual and corporate collectors around the United States and in Europe including educational institutions such as the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (photo above), Charity auctions include the Madame C.J. Walker Theatre Center's Eightieth Anniversary Benefit Auction 2006, and a custom-created painting based on the 1979 Hollywood movie 'Breaking Away for the Indianapolis International Film Festival, 2008.
Commissions include a series of post-card paintings, as commission for the Florida International University Department of Art, Miami, Florida, 2005 (to coincide with Art Basel Miami 2005) and a series of ten post-card sized paintings for the Indianapolis Museum of Art's Gallery of the Machine in 2006. Site-specific public art commissions include a permanent wall mural measuring 13.8 feet wide and 4 feet high, for the front lobby of Crooked Creek Elementary School, Marion County, Indianapolis, this March 2008 site-specific public art project made possible through a grant to the school by the Metropolitan School Foundation, a public school district in Indianapolis, a pair of large paintings for the MGM Mirage that are permanently housed inside the Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Las Vegas since 2004 (photo above), and site-specific installation of five large-scale mixed-media paintings by the Arts Council of Indianapolis at Chase Towers near Monument Circle Indianapolis in 2006-2007, an annual project supported by the Indianapolis Cultural Development Commission.
Academically, Chitra Ramanathan's work has attracted visiting artist lectures to educational institutions such as the Kansas State University's department of art, and Royal Academy of Arts/Royal Academy Schools London in 2005, an invitation from Keeper and Head Maurice Cockrill, RA.
Chitra earned her second Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting with Honors in 1993 during which period she also allotted time to study Painting and Art History in Paris, France, with extended visits to Giverny, France that influenced her later work. Earlier, she received a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from Stella Maris College, Chennai, India.
She lives and works in the United States, while accepting travels worldwide for invitational lectures and freelance projects/commissions.
