1924-2015 · Chandigarh, India
A government roads inspector who spent nearly twenty years secretly building a kingdom of broken crockery and bangles in a forest clearing, and got away with it.
The life
Chand came to Chandigarh as a refugee after Partition and took a job inspecting roads for the public works department of Le Corbusier’s famous planned city. From 1957 he began clearing a patch of protected jungle by night and filling it with figures made from the city’s rubble. When officials discovered the illegal garden in 1975 it already covered acres. Demolition was unthinkable, the public adored it, so the city gave him a salary and a workforce instead. He ran the Rock Garden until his death in 2015.
The work
Armies of dancers, musicians, monkeys and queens, built from concrete and dressed in smashed bangles, broken tiles, crockery shards and electrical waste. Waterfalls, courtyards and low tunnel gateways that force even important visitors to bow. The Rock Garden now covers some forty acres and receives thousands of visitors a day, making it one of the most visited artworks on earth.
Why we love them
The greatest planning violation in art history. One man quietly out-built an entire modernist city with its own rubbish.
Go deeper
- Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
- The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.
Kindred spirits
Simon Rodia1879-1965, Los Angeles, USA
Helen Martins1897-1976, Nieu-Bethesda, South Africa
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Untrained and unstoppable, like them? Like us?