Jogen Chowdhury's painting 'Partition' tries to brush away the past chaos

Five recent works of Jogen Chowdhury, currently on display in the Capital, focus on migration, memories of Partition, and the pandemic
Jogen Chowdhury in front of his artwork, ‘Partition’
Jogen Chowdhury in front of his artwork, ‘Partition’

A woman languorously looks over a vista of abundance, while another cowers in despair beside a reed-thin man in the throes of death. The Mahatma, also part of the scene, turns away dejected. This poignant picture is the subject of a large work, titled ‘Partition’ by Jogen Chowdhury, one of India’s foremost contemporary artists. It holds pride of place in a new exhibition, Art of Bengal, currently on display at Delhi’s Treasure Art Gallery.

“My family migrated across the border from what is now Bangladesh, and it was a tough time for Bengali migrants. Though Punjabis also migrated, they had an entrepreneurial spirit and the advantage of moving to the Capital city, which at the time was quite empty in comparison to Bengal. The suffering of that time was immense. The State was not capable of maintaining the refugees and unemployment became a huge issue. 

I have tried to show this transition of Bengali migrants from being prosperous to losing everything, through this work,” shares Chowdhury, who was educated at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

His masterful usage of the cross-hatching technique has made him almost synonymous with this style of painting, where lines enhance colours and depict curves to make his abstract figures look realistic.  A collectors’ favourite, a painting of Chowdhury’s from the 1990s was recently auctioned for an impressive amount of `65,50,684 ($87,341).

Besides his 2017 painting, which is on display, along with the works of 14 of his compatriots, including Sanat Kar, Ganesh Haloi, Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri, Sunil De and Goutam Choudhury, the show also features two smaller works made during the pandemic––‘Lonely Man’ and ‘Blind Terror (Bird)’ ––which mirror his frame of mind during this difficult period. There is also the recent ‘Looking at Each Other’, representing his strongest artistic suit, the relationship between a man and woman. The last is an untitled bronze sculpture of a woman fashioned in his signature style.

 Of his works on display, ‘Blind Terror (Bird)’ is particularly striking. He asserts that beside the connotation of the Coronavirus eating humans, it also depicts increasing incidents of violence goaded by deep-set religious differences. Conveying multiple meanings through a seemingly simplistic subject is Chowdhury’s forte. The octogenarian explains, “My work is not abstract, but I bring the quality of abstractness in creating real forms. The form and gesture displaying emotion is most important to me. My work has never been completely realistic, but it also cannot be categorised as completely abstract.” 
However one classifies the style, it is undoubtedly his own.

WHERE & WHEN: Art of Bengal Treasure Art Gallery
D-24 Defence Colony, New Delhi
On till October 6, 2022

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