Artist
C. Krishnaswamy
Salem · Chennai
Ashvita's
Biography
C. Krishnaswamy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and performance, with a particular emphasis on live art. Over the years, he has become especially known for his performance-based works—spontaneous, instinct-driven acts that draw from a rich matrix of bodily awareness, ritual, tradition, and everyday observation. His performances function as meditative explorations of transience, energy, masquerade, and transformation, often blurring the lines between the material and immaterial, the sacred and the mundane. Rooted in personal memory and lived experience, Krishnaswamy’s work is profoundly informed by his upbringing in Chinnasalem, a small town in Tamil Nadu. The textures, movements, and ritual cycles of his native environment—its festivals, community practices, and oral traditions—continue to shape his visual and performative vocabulary. Rather than seeking theatricality, his performances often evoke states of vulnerability, flux, and quiet revelation, allowing the viewer to witness the emergence of meaning through gesture, repetition, and presence. A graduate of the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, Krishnaswamy has built a significant body of work that has been presented at national and international platforms. His notable exhibitions and residencies include Tribal Energy (2019) in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Primordial Particle Frequency (2017) at the Piramal Art Residency in Mumbai, Kundalini (2016) at the Busan International Art Fair in South Korea, All Imperceptible Attractive Energy (2016) in Taipei, Taiwan, and This Impermanent Imperfect Form (2015) at Khoj’s International Workshop in Pune. These projects, while geographically diverse, share a throughline of deep somatic inquiry and a commitment to the ephemeral and the elemental. Krishnaswamy’s art resists easy categorization. Whether through drawing, installation, or performance, he operates at the intersection of intuition, discipline, and embodied knowledge. His work is as much about presence as it is about process—about the unfolding of time and space through lived, improvised acts. He currently lives and works in Chennai, where he continues to experiment across media and modes of engagement, drawing viewers into layered experiences of perception, introspection, and transformation.
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