Santanu Dey’s second solo art exhibition is all about how ‘humans have crossed all their limits’

With an unnerving, ominous sense of calm, Silent Spring, Santanu Dey’s second solo exhibition with Art Incept, begins, and ends, with an all-too-deserving accusation, "Humne saari hadein paar kardi hai" (we have crossed all limits). The exhibition, mentored by Prima Kurien, is taking place till October 9 at Art Incept, Gurugram.

What forms the theme for Santanu Dey’s second solo exhibition?

Environmental issues that are results of human behaviour are the core concern for Santanu that he hopes to communicate through his work. The unscrupulous use of natural resources, the impact of consumerism and the mindless exploiting of resources for minor comforts are some of the emotions that he expresses through his practice.

If Unseen City, Santanu’s debut show in 2023, introduced an introspective hand that remained plaintively sober over monumental works of paper, canvas, and other ephemeral media, here, the artist is remade, reborn. We are now made aware of an absence, an anger, a violent silence, of all that is green, natural, and nourishing, There is no ‘mother’ here; this is nature that has become tense, brutal, and unwelcoming. It is here, in this unnatural quietude of daily life, that Santanu’s artistic practice emerges: a numbing engagement with environment and ecology, shaped by his personal experience of witnessing the slow violence of urbanisation in his hometown of Kolkata, studying at Vadodara, and living in Delhi. 

This is his world, his ruinous Earth where human suffering and ecological crisis have become inseparable. Yamuna (2025), with its grotesque forms of offal and intestines, raises a river of irrevocable loss, a flood of hunger, starvation, as well as gluttony, leeching on the very land that gave it birth. In such wreckage, the artist scavenges his truest expression in drawing and painting. “Whenever a thought comes to my mind, I have to draw,” he says. Santanu’s artistic impulse is urgent and compulsive, where remnants of brick dust, concrete, and weathered canvases, silent witnesses of human intervention, fragments of a world being incessantly torn apart and remade, become painterly mediums.

His recent works make one thing glaringly obvious: there is no hopeful antidote waiting to be synthesised in these works. The wood-and-iron sculpture Earth Goddess (2025), or the oil painting Let me Fly (2025) make this painfully literal. Santanu does not walk us into an avian sanctuary, an enclosure with doors open, but ushers, pushes us inside a catacomb with no exit. We are buried, suddenly thrust inside a twilight zone that amplifies the contradictions inherent in human progress. Invoking both industry and ruin, his skies are darkened, his thunderstorms painted in bloody hues, his landscapes etched with the relentless march of destruction. With works such as Dark Night (2025), Santanu, using discarded waste and lost flora, presents us with an effigy, a lightning rod of devastation. Were you able to shelter yourself from the rain, before you came in?

On View Till: Thursday, 9th October 2025
Timings: Monday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM
Address: Art Incept, 227 South Point Mall, Golf Course Road,
DLF Phase 5, Gurugram, Haryana 122002

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