The identity crisis is obv-ious, yet 45-year-old Kerala-born and Mumbai-based Bose Krishnamachari has come to represent the new face of Indian art on the international stage. He is as much at home hurriedly gulping chai while painting in his suburban Borivili studio as he is hobnobbing with the world’s arterati while delicately sipping wine at a vernissage in Paris, Milan or Venice. Not surprisingly, he was among the handful of people that royal art collector Francesca von Habsburg from Vienna (married to the Archduke Karl of Austria) met when she came to India to acquaint herself with Indian art. “He is also a curator,” she pointed out, “something I find lacking in India.”

When Artcurial held their first auction in France dedicated to modern and contemporary Indian art in December last year, they referred to Bose as “the rising star of the Indian contemporary world and the curator of many exhibitions”. That this artist-curator is a social animal to boot is as evident on Page Three as it is from the fact that filmmakers, musicians, actors, theatre luminaries, fashion designers, bureaucrats and corporate czars in India unequivocally consider him their bosom buddy. With the designer tees/ shirts and trousers he now sports, a scarf or cravat jauntily tied around his neck, the psychedelic frames of his spectacles perched on his bald pate and snazzy shoes gracing his feet, the self-conducted mag-ical makeover of Bose Krishnamachari from a reticent greenhorn fresh out of rural Kerala to a multihued and self-assured man of the world is complete.

Transformation is something Bose equates with the city that nurtured his dreams and forever changed his life. Not many know that he was a sickly child who had to be hospitalised due to a blood condition that left him semi-comatose. When he recovered, he came to Mumbai on a whim and a prayer to become an artist – but the authorities at the JJ School of Art refused him admission. He persisted and succeeded in studying fine art at the institution that initially acknowledged his genius with gold medals and even appointed him to teach there while working on his MFA – only to rusticate him for questioning their methods; yet the rebel with a cause cheerfully took it all in his stride.

Over two decades after he tentatively set foot in Mumbai and shared a Saki Naka chawl ‘flat’ with a dozen other bachelors in shifts, laboriously sketching portraits at the Mela restaurant to support himself, Bose qualifies as the ultimate art impresario. But anyone who has observed him from close quarters since he burst on to the city’s art scene and made an impression in the group show Circling the Square in 1993 will agree that he is an unlikely contender for this title. Speaking only Malayalam fluently when he arrived here in 1985 and armed with the smidgen of English that he picked up along the way, he has mumbled his way to the top with amazing alacrity. Today, he may exasperatingly still mumble out of habit… but he is perceptibly more cogent in expressing his thoughts.

Not only is Bose a renowned artist who sketches and paints in a variety of media, creates complicated installations that are considered high art and designs furniture (his father owned a furniture shop) – but he also spends a lot of his limited time and seemingly unlimited energy travelling around the country to unearth creativity, promote new artists and patronise them by buying their work when there are no takers. Consequently, he has amassed a number of art works – but most will not make it to the museum he is planning. While he will gift them to friends who appreciate them, the building he is all set to construct on the 40,000 square feet plot of land he has bought in Aluva, a small town near Kochi, will house the Indian and international art he has been collecting. He is matter-of-fact in that respect, “I am an artist and I like to share. The important thing is to make your work and show it. There are a lot of young artists who have talent, but unfortunately we don’t have any museums in India.”

The museum sketches, plan and model will be on view at Ghost, his forthcoming solo show at the Aicon Gallery, London, along with six portraits of migrant Mumbaikars rendered in the arte povera style (that employs cheap raw materials) and the compelling Ghost/ Trans-memoir installation (LCD monitors embedded into the bellies of 108 metal dabbas suspended on iron scaffolding with the help of hand straps otherwise found in Mumbai’s railway compartments) that was the highlight of the Gateway Bombay show at the Peabody Essex Museum in the USA last year. The tangle of wires, straps, headphones and metal containers is a play on the indomitable spirit of a city constantly on the move.

The busy artist has even more ambitious plans up his designer sleeve – among them a mobile library that will transport the collection of books and DVDs that comprise his installation LaVa (Laboratory of Visual Arts) to remote villages in the country. He has already taken possession of one of the four trucks he plans to redesign with cupboards, DVD players, seating and toilets for the purpose. The idea is to dispatch them simultaneously to different places, where people who have no access to such reading and viewing material can experience this moving work of art.