Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
Inscribed canvas
|
Amitabh Sengupta’s work celebrates a cultured space of scripts and symbols
|
Symbolic The intriguing constructs strive to unveil an unusual visual experience
The experience of living in different cultures or may be it is something else… I tend to work in the introspective mode,” says Kolkata-based artist, Amitabh Sengupta. “The mundane stories of human life, feelings of everyday, all seem to be transcending through time and space, yet they are so similar in all lands. Love and despair, pain and ecstasy all have such similar human meanings that are reflected in expressions of cultures. Thus, past as we infer, continues in the present, transformed through time-meanings… With such thoughts, my paintings have developed during the past 25 years.”
Born in Calcutta in 1941, Sengupta began a distinguished career in the arts by graduating in painting from Government College of Arts and Crafts in 1963. A French government scholarship in Printmaking and Painting took him to Paris where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts (1966 – 68).
Oddly, the art scene in Paris did not stimulate him at all. In fact, he found many European paintings and sculptures to be actually ugly! Strangely, he was never attracted to the works of Pablo Picasso as much as, say, Marc Chagall or even Salvador Dali. What enchanted him were the cine-collections in Cinematheque. “I was for the first time exposed to some wonderful European masters of cinema. I became a great admirer of Ingmar Bergman; his films like the “Wild Strawberries” left on me a lasting impression. I think I learned more watching films than studying at the college.”
Sengupta, incidentally, did have a personal connection with films. Karuna Banerji, (who played the central role of Sarbojaya (Apu’s mother) in Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece, “Pather Panchali” was his aunt. He remembers her strong character and robust personality as an activist in theatre and politics. She was close to Sengupta’s middle class but humanist father.
On return from Europe, Sengupta lived in Chennai and Delhi through 1969-76. The next 11 years were spent in Nigeria as the Head of Visual Arts in two Federal Universities. He also developed art curricula and initiated the Visual Arts set up at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. In between, he received an AICE-UNESCO fellowship and acquired his Masters in Education from the State University of New York.
A prolific painter, Sengupta had three major solo shows in Paris and participated in several international shows in Europe, USA and Nigeria from the mid-1960s to 1980s. His one-man shows in India have been regularly held in Chennai, Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore.
Sengupta’s recent exhibition, “Inscriptions”, collates a set of subtly coloured and emotionally expressive paintings. The works displayed in the show seem like intriguing vignettes that celebrate a cultured space in a bygone era. Often suffused with deliberately indecipherable scripts and mysterious symbols, they uniquely combine elements of the figurative with those of the abstract.
With tiny but significant line drawings of mythological and contemporary images interspersed in an expanding, if abstract landscape, Sengupta’s intriguing constructs strive to unveil an unusual visual experience.
“The narrative elements that seem to be prevalent in my recent paintings are essentially a suggestive point,” says Sengupta. “The real that I use on the most part of my canvas is gradually merged into another animated area, the metaphor of unreal… At this stage of real and unreal, we can shuffle time back and forth, on the same plane of the canvas. A canvas is a continuous zone.”
The exhibition concludes on November 17 at Time and Space Art Gallery, Lavelle Road. Phone: 32969412 / 22124117.
GIRIDHAR KHASNIS
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
