For many of Niren Sen Gupta’s students, his exhibition “Sublimity: A Painter’s Quest” at Visual Arts Gallery was nothing less than a practical demonstration of what he taught them. For others too who haven’t studied under the senior artist, he remains a source of knowledge and guidance. “An art student came and told me I want to learn watercolours. So I told him to collect a few more who want to learn it and come to my studio and I will teach them. In our times we could only work with five colours and now art students are allowed to work with a wide palette of 48 colours so they don’t know how to make colours,” says the former Principal of College of Art, Delhi. Only someone like him who understands the requirements of a student would do something as considerate as bringing out a catalogue specifically for them. “While the bigger one has the images of all the paintings, the smaller one has a lot of things being said by me,” says the Delhi-based painter, who has taught over 30 years at graduate and post-graduate levels in various art institutions.
The exhibition is an assortment of works from his 40 years of artistic career where he has collated one of two works from every year on an average. The collection comprises his early works, paintings never seen by anyone and paintings he wanted to keep with himself like the collage and pen and ink drawing done in 1983 in the memory of his mother. “I wanted to show to my students to how to respect your work, your evolution as an artist.” And different series done by him through his career like ‘Touch’, ‘Angel’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Moksha’ reflected it rather well. “Every painting is related to something I experienced at that time,” says pointing at the ‘Angel’ series — dense pen and ink drawings depicting small innocent boys wearing poignant expressions. It was borne out of the trauma of 1971 partition. “I was born in what is now Bangladesh. I saw hordes and hordes of refugees at Sealdah and Howrah station which left me really disturbed. These refugees became angels in these works.”
‘Touch’ he feels was another symbolic work that emerged when he was young and impressionable. “I was sentimental. I absorbed and reacted to what was happening around me in a different manner. I first called this series ‘temptation’ but later I changed it to ‘touch’. While the huge drawings that he did as part of this body of work sold out but paintings remained with him.” The paintings rendered in limited palette is a subtle expression of longing with just a hand and a fruit at some distance.
With changing topics kept changing his style of expression. From the figuration of his early works, Sen Gupta’s journey into abstraction and finally geometric abstraction is clearly visible. “I wasn’t inspired by any particular movement. The canvas allowed me complete liberty that I couldn’t get anywhere so I experimented. And also as I moved towards spirituality, I realised facial features, definite forms became less and less significant and I started to focus on the essence rather.” The artist’s spiritual inclinations — he is involved with Ramakrishna Mission — become amply evident in his canvases portraying monks and other enlightened souls. Nature, lotus, goat are other occupants in his colour-laden canvas which are suffused with serenity.
