T.V. Santhosh reinvents images of global conflict, terrorism, war and state oppression, appropriated from various media sources. He is best known for his large-scale photorealistic oil paintings—images rendered in bright neon colors, in which the darks and lights are reversed, like a color negative.

The referents are as stark as the color contrasts: soldiers, blindfolded prisoners, homemade bombs and bomb-sniffing dogs, terrorists and barbed wire, each charged with the explicit and implicit violence of states and insurgents, borders and transgressions. Santhosh's works are often categorized as political, but, on a more fundamental level, they manifest a process of ethical and philosophical questioning.

His paintings forChristie's, Mumbai...