BySukant Deepak

March 17, 2020 (IANSlife) Vadehra Art Gallery will present forty works by the artist Jogen Chowdhury in a travelling exhibition featuring a collection from the Glenbarra Art Museum in Himeji, Japan, most recently exhibited in Kolkata in November 2019 and in Mumbai by Pundole Art Gallery in January 2020. 

The exhibition, which will be on display from March 21 to April 5 at Bikaner House, spans four decades of work by the artist, comprising works on paper with ink and pastels, his most preferred medium, with the earliest work on view from 1965.

This Santiniketan-based artist is known for his ability to successfully marry traditional imagery with the zeitgeist of contemporary painting, in a skillful blend of an urbane self-awareness and a highly localised Bengali influence. 

His early works show an attention to figuration, carries through in his current pieces. In an interview, Chowdhury commented that, in his early works, “the space projected a simple iconic presence. A spatial sequence was worked out but the space was not complex. The background seemed to vanish.”

During his college days, Chowdhury took part in leftist literary circles, the members of which dismissed Rabindranath Tagore as a bourgeoisie and became interested in the works of Russian authors. But by and large, Chowdhury kept himself apart from cultural movements; though a friend of the members of the Hungry Generation, his imagery was drawn from his cultural background more than his intellectual milieu.

In 2005, the Glenbarra Art Museum published, Jogen Chowdhury: Enigmatic Visions, on the works of the artist from the museum’s collection. Masanori Fukuoka, the man behind the collection, has been an important contributor and supporter of Indian art and artists since 1989.

He established the Glenbarra Art Museum in 1990 which houses modern and contemporary Indian Art. In November 2019, the collection was relocated to a newly designed museum by Kawazoe Junichiro.

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Sukant Deepak can be contacted at sukant.d@ians.in