T.V. Santhosh is one of the most prominent and recognized of the new generation of contemporary Indian artists. His powerful paintings of apocalyptic world events have evoked strong and sympathetic resonances with a global audience, who have become eager collectors of his works. Santhosh was born in 1968 in Kerla in Southern India. As with many of his contemporaries he graduated in Fine Arts from Santiniketan, subsequently focusing on sculpture for his Master's degree. He now lives and works in Mumbai, the centre of the contemporary art movement in India.

As Santhosh's prestige has grown, his paintings have been exhibited extensively worldwide in London, New York, Zurich, Berlin, Singapore and Beijing. Along with prominent solo exhibitions his works have been included in every major group exhibition of contemporary Indian works including the 2011 important exposition "Collector's Stage: Asian Contemporary Art from Private Collections", Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. In 2011, he also has a major solo exhibition in Berlin, The Land, Nature Morte.

Santhosh's paintings use images of war, global terrorism and acts of violence as their basic starting point. He uses photographs of modern day events particularly events in the Middle East and renders them in the colors of color negatives, greens, oranges and yellows. The immediate effect is to arrest and grasp our interest and focus our attention.

As a child of modern times, Santhosh is highly aware of the dehumanizing effect of present day war, terrorism and violence. He is also highly aware that viewers have become inured to the constant stream of images in the media. As the media has become all-pervasive, we have become adept at ignoring and not registering the horrific events going on globally, thereby failing to judge, and ultimately understand and comprehend the degrading effects of violence.

Santhosh's bold and strong paintings are an attempt to re-engage our attention, to make us pause, and think again of the catastrophic events going on around the world. The effect of the 'negative photograph' technique is while making the real event anonymous, it highlights and emphasizes the inhuman activities being carried out creating an allegorical statement. The bright greens, oranges and yellows are suggestive of a nuclear annihilation, and it is this apocalyptic image that Santhosh wants the viewer to engage with, provoking us to contemplate and consider the appalling and dehumanizing effects of social unrest, revolutions and wars on both the victims and the perpetrators.

Our present painting seems to portray an image of a violent clash. A young revolutionary, appearing to wear a gas mask, struggles between two prominent and dominant men perhaps figureheads of two warring states or factions. The struggle between the youth and the two men dominates the picture. The struggle is further emphasized by the alien-like effect created by the gas mask, suggesting that the thoughts and ideas of the young man are alien and unacceptable to those controlling power.