Ffover, a luxury and home décor brand in Topsia, is organising an exhibition of city-based artists, Avanish Trivedi and his mentor Jiban Biswas. The exhibition, called Calcutta Nostalgia and Cosmic Cows will showcase 15 artworks by both the artists.
While Avanish attempts to depict glimpses of the old Calcutta and its most characteristic representations, including the yellow taxi, the tram, and the hand-pulled rickshaw, in watercolour; Jiban Biswas’s work in acrylic on canvas focuses on cows and the symbolic representation of human beings through them.
“This time we chose to exhibit our work in a new space, as we wanted our artwork to reach out to a good number of people, who usually don’t visit art galleries but appreciate good art nonetheless,” says Avanish Trivedi, who works as an assistant manager in TCS. He is not a full-time artist but took up courses at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture to learn the finesse of the art and takes out time from his busy schedule to paint. “It all started when I met M F Hussain in person,” he tells us.
“Calcutta Nostalgia depicts the essence of old Calcutta, which is fading away. My works are especially for people who don’t live in Calcutta anymore, or even if they do, they see the city changing and feel nostalgic for the remnants of the old Calcutta, which is gradually disappearing from our daily life,” he adds.
While most of Avanish’s works are watercolors, there are some acrylic ones too. His works capture the daily life and lifestyle of Kolkata, from a perspective which is seen and observed very commonly, but largely goes unnoticed and undocumented. Avanish identifies himself as a contemporary artist and combines two opposing cultural trends in his work always juxtaposed against each other- such as the logo of an apparel brand, adjacent to a decrepit wall full of wall graffiti in one of his works.
Jiban Biswas’s Cosmic Cows series, on the other hand, showcases cows as a symbolic representation of his own self. You will find cows represented in different places, in different attires, imitating seemingly human gestures. “The cow series is a representation of myself and depicts the gradual transformation from the simple village life to the modern, urban life which I experienced personally. Cosmic Cows literally means cosmopolitan cows,” says Jiban, a student of Government College of Art.
One of the most intriguing artwork, shows a cow wearing an elaborate attire of saffron cloth, colourful turban, ghungroos, and a pince-nez, among other ornaments commonly worn by human beings; while another one has a cow and its calf, wearing headphones, which mocks at the element of modernisation, building walls between two beings, who are together but not communicating.
“I wanted to show, how every human being is as voiceless as a cow. It always requires a well-defined identity- that of an artist, politician, or a religious figure, to access a platform from which one can voice his/her opinion. Otherwise, the views of a common man largely get unnoticed and ignored,” Jiban tells us.
At Ffover, Topsia, from June 7- June 9, 11 am onwards