The latest exhibition at Artworld – Sarala’s Art International brings together paintings by Pradip Maitra and bronze sculptures by Bimal Kundu—two artists from Bengal who have spent the better part of their lives working in the same medium and returning, again and again, to the same subject: the texture of Indian life as it is actually lived.
Pradip works in watercolour on wood paper, using Indian pigments —blue, burnt sienna, crimson, rust—to build compositions that carry more than they appear to. His recent paintings are centred on books. We enquired about the intention behind, and he says, “A book is a symbol of wisdom, and we are not taking the wisdom from it. Nowadays, we are always taking only information.”
Pradip came to watercolour at a time when others dismissed it as limited. “Watercolour has its limitations—people say it is only for landscapes and that there is nothing more to it,” is what he was told. He made it his challenge. Four decades later, his watercolours hang as fully realised contemporary paintings, allegorical in subject and confident in medium.
An interesting fact about Pradip’s works is its rustic touch. When asked, he explains how the rusty, earthy palette is not simply aesthetic. “Everything is moisturised. The people and everybody. There is no tracing. A figure in a gown is not a period portrait but an allegory. The Indians are imitating everybody. As a third-world country, India is imitating everything from America, Russia, and London, but they are not keeping their own ideology and own thing, own subjects, or own costumes and anything.”
The other half of the exhibition is by sculptor Bimal Kundu. His sculptures work from an opposite direction but arrive at similar territory. Bimal is known for his approach to form and three-dimensional artistic expressions, and the visitors can taste an essence of this at the exhibition.
Bimal calls himself a ‘foot soldier’ artist — someone whose subjects emerge from the people immediately around him in urban Kolkata. Musicians, a bull, portraits, a mother and child — all built first in clay, then cast in bronze. “The transformation from earth to metal becomes an essential part of the work’s journey,” he adds.
His works are majorily on medium scale and Bimal shares why that is intentional. “I want my works to remain close to people, within their reach, and accessible to the ordinary viewer.”
Nearly 50 years in, Bimal has seen the world change considerably around him. “To observe people, to live alongside them, and to understand their labour and dreams —this direct engagement with life can make the practice of art more truthful and authentic. The direct experience of observing and understanding human life has perhaps become even more important,” he says.
“For me, the fundamental lesson of art is,therefore, very simple: to look at people not from a distance, but by standing beside them. It is through this act of looking, observing, and living alongside people that sculpture discovers its true life,” he adds.
Open to all. Till September 10. 11 am to 6 pm (except Sundays). At Artworld – Sarala’s Art International, Teynampet.
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