After five decades of working with drawing, printmaking, painting and mixed media, artist Kanchan Chander is now turning to abstraction, exploring architectural forms, geometry and space while retaining the figurative elements that have long shaped her work.

Explore the works of Kanchan Chander at this exhibition in Delhi

Her retrospective, ‘The Grammar of the Self: Kanchan Chander – Prints and Drawings’, brings together works from across her career. Curated by Kishore Singh, the show will remain on display until October 31, at Delhi’s Gallery Ragini.

Singh, who has known Chander as an artist for around three decades, says he has long been drawn to her printmaking and drawing. For him, putting together a retrospective spanning nearly 50 years meant selecting and editing works, placing them into categories and looking at how they speak to one another. “It was quite a formidable task. Also, a hugely enjoyable task, and for me, a learning exercise because I was able to explore so many of her older works in great depth,” he adds.

For the love of art

Chander explains that her work has been shaped by her experiences of living and studying in places including East Berlin, Santiago and Paris. Her work made in France, for instance, included a series based on noses. Chander recalls that she received a French Government scholarship in 1984 to study for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in France. And the prominent noses of the Parisians caught her eye.

Chander’s time in Chile led to works featuring Chilean faces. The Chilean portraits, Singh says, carry an emotional quality. Made when Chile was under dictatorship, he describes them as “haunting”, particularly because of the expressions in the eyes of the men and women she portrayed.

Meanwhile, the portraits from the late 1970s to early 1980s feature faces rendered in ink and Conté (a type of crayon made with powdered graphite or charcoal) on paper, with spontaneous strokes giving them an expressive quality. Her self-portraits span various mediums, including watercolour, Conté, pencil colours and poster colours.

A new artistic language

The retrospective also shows Chander’s move towards abstraction. The artist points out that she began exploring abstract architectural drawings around three years ago. It was a challenge; it was an area she had not explored extensively before.

Chander notes that she does not begin her work with a set philosophy or a deliberate idea of what it should mean. Instead, she prefers to create intuitively and leave the interpretation to others.

She describes her recent works as “architectural abstractions” rather than purely abstract compositions. Meanwhile, Singh also notes that some of the forms in these abstract works appear figure-like, creating a link between the architectural compositions and her earlier studies of the human body. 

The drawings are created in bold colours and contrasts of blue, green, red and orange. In ‘Waltz of Forms III’, for instance, she depicts a human-like figure using geometric shapes such as rhombuses, triangles and rectangles. Brown, white and teal dominate the work. Faceless, indefinite figures recur throughout Chander’s works from 2023 onwards. In another artwork, titled ‘Play of Architectural Forms V’, Chander creates an architectural structure made up of colourful blocks against a bright yellow background.

‘Follow your heart’

For Chander, abstraction does not necessarily have to be understood in a fixed way. She believes a viewer can respond to a work through feeling and perception rather than trying to find one definite meaning.

“If the artist has experienced a certain feeling while creating a work, and the viewer connects with that feeling, it can become a sublime experience,” she remarks. “It can happen even with an abstract work… it depends on how you see and perceive it.”

Singh similarly sees colour and emotion as an important part of understanding abstract art. “Eventually all art is about colour, and it's about emotion,” he says. He believes that while artists can communicate through figures and narratives, abstraction allows colour and form to carry that emotion.

Alongside the changes in her own practice, Chander also discusses talks of changes in the art world. She remembers an earlier period when artists would regularly meet, talk and spend time together in informal settings. At the same time, she sees younger artists as more aware of how to navigate the art world than her generation was. Her advice to them is to remain connected to their own work rather than allowing expectations from galleries, collectors or peers to determine their practice otherwise it may affect creativity. “Always follow your heart,” she says. 

This article is written by Pankil Jhajhria

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