Rising Stars: Dheeraj Kumar aka. Silentstoryteller

Dheeraj Kumar, born 1991, hails from Muzzaffarpur, Bihar and is a trained fashion designer turned photographer and artist. He aspires to define with his lenses, his personal approach towards life, beauty and art. Dheeraj is inspired by artists like Frida Kahlo, Robert Mapplethrope and Henry Moore. Anonymous male bodies have been a constant motif in his art. He uses the body as a canvas over which he experiments by superimposing different styles of ornamentations- ranging from botanical floral drawings to masks and markings inspired by the art of Rangoli. Dheeraj draws from his own experiences of the human body to represent it untethered by the burden of rigid gender conventions imposed by society and his own cultural upbringing.

He exposes, through elaborate staging and meticulous contortions, the landscapes of the human body and the many hidden nooks and crannies that carry traces of untapped and concealed emotions. The body becomes the subject and the object in his work- rendered into abstraction, reminiscent of organic rocks and boulders but somehow still retaining its ‘human-ness’ albeit in an unsettlingly intimate way that provokes the viewer’s primal instinct to touch and experience the sensory pleasure of bare skin. He currently divides his time between Bangalore and Bihar.