Siramdasu Venkata Rama Rao was born in Gudivada, British India (now India) in 1936. He arrived in England in 1962 on a Commonwealth Fellowship, studying at the Slade School of Fine Art until 1965. As a celebrated cubist painter, Rao was centrally involved in the early formation of the Indian Painters Collective, the first group of its kind in the UK.
Artist Siramdasu Venkata Rama Rao was born in Gudivada, British India (now India) in 1936. After graduating from his studies in Accounting and Banking at Andhra University in 1955, he studied art under the tutelage of K. Venugopal and later under K. Srinivasulu, securing a government diploma in Fine Arts from Kalakshetra in Chennai. On the insistence of Madhavapeddi Gokhale, the progressive director of Kalakshetra, Rao joined the Madras School of Arts and Crafts (now the Government College of Fine Arts), also in Chennai. There his painting practice was improved by his association with the renowned painter, K. C. S. Paniker, and he passed his Fine Arts degree course in 1959. The same year, Rao won a Government of India research fellowship which took him to New Delhi, where he stayed until 1962. After receiving a Commonwealth Fellowship that year, he migrated to England and began his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, under William Coldstream, where he remained until 1965 (Punj, 2012; Komechak Art Gallery profile).
In London, Rao wanted ‘to challenge Western artists in their own form’, inventing a new painting technique by applying paint directly on boards and using oil paints to give the illusion of water colour painting, bemusing Coldstream on one occasion (Punj, 2012). His work took on a vibrant form of cubism. In 1964, Rao joined the Indian Painters Collective (IPC), an association for Indian artists living and working in London, recently founded by Yashwant Mali, Gajanan Bhagwat, Lancelot Ribeiro and Ibrahim Wagh. As the first artistic body of its kind outside India, one of the key ventures of this group was an exhibition, Six Indian Painters, held at the Tagore India Centre, India House, London in 1964. Opened by the Indian High Commissioner, Dr Jivraj N. Mehta and Jennie Lee, then Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, Rao showed alongside Bhagwat, Ribeiro, Wagh, Mali and Balraj K. Khanna. The collective intended to show that Indian artists could also be contemporary participants in regular international exhibitions (Ribeiro, Art UK, 2019; Diaspora Artists). In 1965, the same year he graduated from the Slade, Rao showed in the Second Commonwealth Biennial of Abstract Art Exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, London, where he was selected as ‘The Most Outstanding Artist in the Commonwealth’. Over the following two years, he taught painting and drawing at London County Council (Komechak Art Gallery profile).
In 1967 Rao moved to the USA and completed a Master of Fine Arts course at the University of Cincinnati two years later, concurrently teaching there. He then became Professor of Fine Arts at Western Kentucky University, later moving to Chicago. In 2001, for his contributions to the field of art, Rao was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in his native country, by the Government of India (Punj, 2012). He returned to India two years later, where he continues to pursue his work. Subsequently, selected artworks and items from his archive were shown in London’s Grosvenor Gallery at The Roots of the Indian Artists’ Collectives exhibition in 2019, about which gallery director, Charles Moore, stated that many of the exhibited artists ‘did not have the exposure their work deserved at the time’, and that their ‘story is a common one; of aesthetic unappreciation and discrimination’ (exhibition catalogue, 2019). Siramdasu Venkata Rama Rao’s work is held in the UK public domain in the collections of the UCL Art Museum, and the V&A in London.