Nagesh Goud is an artist whose practice lives in the deep currents of Andhra Pradesh's spiritual and literary inheritance. A gold medallist from JNTU Hyderabad born in 1965, he has spent his career in conversation with the great epics the Mahabharata and Ramayana not as historical relics but as accounts still resonating through contemporary life, still asking questions about dharma, desire, and hu...
Nagesh Goud is an artist whose practice lives in the deep currents of Andhra Pradesh's spiritual and literary inheritance. A gold medallist from JNTU Hyderabad born in 1965, he has spent his career in conversation with the great epics the Mahabharata and Ramayana not as historical relics but as accounts still resonating through contemporary life, still asking questions about dharma, desire, and human complexity. His paintings absorb the visual languages of his region's ancient crafts Kalamkari textiles, Paithani weaving, and the leather shadow puppets of Tholu Bommalata. He borrows these vocabularies and remakes them as his own, filling canvases with boldly flattened faces that echo puppet theatre, layering intricate patterns and mythological incident across densely worked surfaces where every mark carries narrative weight and symbolic resonance. What makes Goud's work distinctive is how he splinters these sacred stories, leaving strategic voids and ruptures that demand the viewer look harder, think deeper, sit with ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning. His vision has gained recognition through awards from major Indian art institutions, and through his recent curatorial practice, he has positioned himself as a guardian of how contemporary Indian artists engage with their own visual and spiritual legacies.
