Veteran artist Robin Mondal is back in the city with his unique figurative style, complete with bold stokes and thick layers of paint mostly in black and red, depicting ‘heads’.
Famous for his signature distorted and grotesque heads, the artist, who has defended his style by saying that painting is for communication and not decoration, continues to exploit the grotesque to express inner turmoil and human struggles that are perhaps a reflection of his formative years as an artist.
He says the dark alleys of Howrah, where he witnessed nightmarish poverty and spent time noticing the juxtaposition of how the poorest of the poor and the affluent live within a stone’s throw away from each other have influenced his work.
“It was tragic to watch some lying untreated, while those who could afford it continued to spend money on even a dead man,” said the artist.
As a young painter, the 70-year-old was attracted by Jamini Roy’s folk style and Rabindranath Tagore’s disquieting paintings and drawings.
However, an encounter with avant-garde Western art by a group of French artist was a turning point in his artistic career.
“For me, art is an expression of my inner-most self,” he said.
