Constellations
Artworks by Jogen Chowdhury | Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya | Arunima Choudhury | Chandra Bhattacharjee
Arindam Chatterjee | Soma Das | Tamal Bhattacharya | Anjan Modak
February 12 – March 13, 2021
Constellations, an exhibition by Emami Art, brings together eight contemporary artists from Bengal featuring Jogen Chowdhury, Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya, Arunima Choudhury, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Arindam Chatterjee, Soma Das, Tamal Bhattacharya and Anjan Modak.
The exhibition presents a range of practices. Although no stylistic grouping or common thematic ground holds these artists within the exhibition, the varied practices appear as eight distinct conceptual postures or constellations in the curated space of the gallery. These artists address diverse concerns, exploring meanings, implications and the politics of our anxious time.
After the Masters Breaking Step
Walking With An online exhibition by Kala Bhavana Faculty Members
January 5 – February 5, 2021
After the Masters: Breaking Step – Walking With is an online exhibition by Emami Art that will be showcasing the works of Kala Bhavana Faculty members.
Kala Bhavana has just crossed its hundredth year and has been marked by informality and freedom – opening up multiple avenues before its mentors and mentees to choose from. Thus, the tradition of tactile media has often taken a conceptual route. New forms and genres have come to cohabit with the traditional tracts and opened up the spaces for thinking about ‘creativity and construction’ (Tagore’s favorite words) and helped to unpack the wistful and the redundant in art language. Thereby, a mnemonic space has come alive, facing fresh challenges and growing. This multiplicity resonates in many of the institute’s common acts. A long journey is often an exhaustive affair and needs replenishment. The current exhibition can be understood as a fresh marker as well as a challenging testing-ground in that journey along those multiple paths.
Khoai Landscape | খোয়াই ল্যান্ডস্কেপ
Works on paper by Ghana Shyam Latua
January 5 – January 30, 2021
Khoai Landscape | খোয়াই ল্যান্ডস্কেপ is a bilingual show by Emami Art that will be showcasing the works on paper by Ghana Shyam Latua. Ghana Shyam was deeply fascinated by the landscape paintings of the Santiniketan artists when he first saw them as a student of Kala Bhavana. In his paintings of Khoai, he, however, has consciously chosen not to follow the tradition of the Santiniketan artists, for the sublime presence that once inspired the artists and poets of Santiniketan is now largely lost and threatened by the rapid spread of tourism and urbanization. Surrounded by the white blank spaces, Khoai is depicted in his monochrome paintings in the exhibition not as a panoramic landscape but as a series of fragmented frames, like plots.
GESTURES | রূপভঙ্গি
Drawings and linocuts by Partha Pratim Deb
December 18, 2020 – January 30, 2021
Partha Pratim Deb, who is best known for his unique and colourful assemblage of the discarded household objects, maintains a long, persistent and productive career in exploring newer possibilities in drawing as an independent medium of creative expression.
What Partha Pratim wants to practice can be called “the pure cultivation of the means” of drawing. Instead of setting out to depict something visible, he uses the shapes and lines for their own sake, giving sole emphasis to their graphic quality. His drawing begins without pre-planning, allowing the abstract composition to emerge through a process of improvisation, introspection and submission – an innovative approach makes him something of a rarity among the contemporary Indian artists.
FLUID BOUNDARIES
Curated by art historian & critic, Nanak Ganguly
November 6 – December 15, 2020
“Fluid Boundaries, curated by art historian & critic, Nanak Ganguly will be showcasing exemplary works-of-art across diverse genres by Snehasish Maity, Debasis Barui, Tapas Biswas, Bholanath Rudra and Suman Dey. In ‘Fluid Boundaries’ we will find the works of these cutting edge artists to confront our traditional experience of sound, light and image, how these are re-ordered and returned in an innovative role reflecting the artist’s choice of subject. The artworks will be all about physical, metaphoric and psychological implications that are always entangled and represented in socio-linguistic patterns. Viewings of these vast range of paintings, sculptures and installations at Emami Art will result not in familiarity but fresh discoveries.
Suburban Shadows: Recent works on paper by Prasanta Sahu
October 15 – November 30, 2020
Concerned with farming and agriculture in the context of modern life and the representation of daily labourers of various occupations in the suburban localities, the recent works of Prasanta Sahu in the exhibition revolve around the particular notion of the study, understood not as a regular academic practice – a drawing or sketch done in preparation for a finished piece – but something close to the anthropological idea of case-study: the contextual analysis of the everyday life and actions of an individual, group or community that exhibits the morphology of the social structure. A trained artist, Sahu also has a background in electrical engineering. His work thus shows both the pictorial intelligence and imagination of an artist and the analytic approaches of the scientific disciplines. There are contradictions, and his work encompasses them. More often than not, the fieldwork documents, data table and photographs veer abruptly from a scientifically oriented daily account to an avant-garde oneiric montage of images, texts and numbers.
Āroh
Emami Art Open Call Exhibition
September 30 – October 30, 2020
Āroh, an online exhibition brings together an exciting range of practices and languages exploring diverse concerns of twelve talented artists from across India. They are the winners of the First Emami Art Open Call Mentorship and Exhibition Programme 2020 and were chosen by a jury from over two hundred applicants. The selected artists are Anirban Saha and Arindam Sinha (Kolkata, Arpita Akhanda (Cuttack), Daina Mohapatra (New Delhi), David Malaker (Kolkata), Debashish Paul (Nadia), Dhara Mehrotra (Bangalore), Janhavi Khemka (Varanasi), Kalpana Vishwas (Santiniketan), Kumar Ranjan (Faridabad), Manisha Agrawal (Lucknow) and Neelesh Yogi (Indore). This exhibition is part of Emami Art’s programme to provide talented artists with a platform to exhibit their works, as well as support in the form of mentorship and advisory. The twelve awardees also received a one-on-one mentorship session plus portfolio review from our five mentors, eminent art practitioners Adip Dutta, Jagannath Panda, Praneet Soi, Prasanta Sahu, TV Santhosh as well as Emami Art CEO Richa Agarwal and project curator Ushmita Sahu.
INSIGHTS । অন্তর্দৃষ্টি
Paintings by Bholanath Rudra and Suman Dey
September 2 to September 30, 2020
The exhibition presents the recent paintings by Bholanath Rudra and Suman Dey, two exceptionally talented young contemporary artists based in Kolkata. A graduate of Rabindra Bharati University, Bholanath is an accomplished watercolourist; for him, the process of painting is not just a means to an end, a mere matter of skill and draughtsmanship, but a means of penetrating the reality, of probing beyond the surface appearance to capture the essential mood of the subjects. Many of his large-scale watercolours, which show his mastery in handling the medium, have a compelling presence, revealing the exalted quality of the sublime.
Bengal Masters: A Tribute
Works of eminent artists, from the collection of Emami Art
August 20 – September 30, 2020
Modern Indian Art has an eclectic character that privileges a cross-cultural exchange and hybridity over cultural purity. A remarkable blending of the elements borrowed from the modern art of the West and India’s traditional antecedents, the works of the modern masters in the exhibition, from Nandalal Bose to Jogen Chowdhury, show the plural, eclectic nature of Indian Modernism, which has a unique history in Bengal, closely connected to the social, political and cultural life of the region.
This online exhibition presents the works of nine eminent artists, from the collection of Emami Art. They are Nandalal Bose, Indra Dugar, K.G. Subramanyan, Jamini Roy, Abani Sen, Gopal Ghose, Nikhil Biswas, Kartick Chandra Pyne and Jogen Chowdhury. It is a selection focused on the master artists from Bengal, each one of them has a distinctive approach, style and artistic vocabulary, which affirm their place in the global history of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Fragmented Life | খন্ডিত জীবন
Anjan Modak
August 5 to August 31, 2020
With the nationwide lockdown declared on 24 March, the government halted all forms of public transport and shut down markets to protect its citizens. It helped those who could afford to stay in but not those outside this circle of protection. The lockdown wreaked havoc on the migrant labourers, who were left starving and homeless in many big cities of India and unprotected against the virus. The entire nation was shocked to witness the incredible suffering and deaths of the migrant workers making their long journey home on foot in the sweltering heat of the summer. Affected by the sights of suffering, Anjan Modak has painted the series of small size, circular-format paintings titled Fragmented Life, showing the dismal experiences of the migrant workers in the hard times of pandemic.
Though topical, the series of paintings can be seen as part of the artist’s large body of works that represents the life of the working class. Showing mastery in narrative figuration, these works invoke no triumph of labour, but an aesthetics of the everyday life, connecting mundane, commonplace objects, gestures, memories and emotions to the wider, dominant social and political forces shaping the popular life of the society. Drawing on diverse visual traditions, from surrealism and puppetry to biology textbook illustrations, in his paintings Anjan, an insider and well familiar with the complexity of the subaltern mentalities, marked by the sense of subordination, anomie and insecurity, does not represent the subaltern life merely objectively, but as a layered, fragmented narrative of body, history and the city.
Tales of Our Time | এইসময়ের পট
Recent paintings of Anwar Chitrakar
July 5, 2020 to July 31, 2020
The paintings of Anwar Chitrakar in this online exhibition show his artistic talent in making sense of the pandemic times we are living through.
Born in 1980 to a traditional patua family at Naya Village, West Midnapore, Anwar received his training in Bengal folk paintings from his father Amar Chitrakar. Working within the stylistic boundaries of Kalighat Painting, Anwar, however, does not habitually repeat the past, but uses the visual potentialities of the conventional art forms to capture the transitory sights and emotions of the everyday world, the strangeness and banality of which we see down the streets. In his pata paintings, the iconic figuration, flowing lines, tonal volumes, intercepted by brilliant hues, bring to the fore not the stories depicted in them but artist’s unique visions and his astute sense of humour. Giving the traditional art forms a contemporary touch, Anwar plays the painter as a flamboyant storyteller, as well as a witty comedian.
Anwar lives and works from Naya village, which is home to over two hundred families of folk painters or patuas working as a close-knit community. Unlike many of them, Anwar is contemporising traditional art forms, responding to the art world’s renewed interest in making the tribal and folk art more mainstream.
Stand with Bengal
MASH | INA PURI | KCC brings to you a fundraiser to support Bengal
June 7 2020 – July 7 2020
As Cyclone Amphan made landfall, raging powerfully across the city & the villages, wreaking havoc upon anything & anyone in its path, homes were destroyed, homes & stretches of forest land ravaged. For those few hours, it felt like the gods had forsaken Bengal. When the storm finally abated realisation dawned that it would take a very long while to get back to normal. To rebuild lives & livelihoods. To restore the destroyed villages & equally, the city of Kolkata.
Watching from afar & unable to help immediately was deeply troubling. Like me, friends & members of the art fraternity based elsewhere, all felt we had to help as individuals & as a community.That was how Stand with Bengal began- with a plea to the people willing to help to come forward & plan an initiative that would raise funds for Bengal.
We were going to do our very best & reach out to people who most desperately need our support. I am deeply grateful for the immediate & spontaneous support of Shalini Passi & Richa Agarwal who agreed to this fundraising project for our Bengal immediately. The artists we reached out to, all agreed to either donate or contribute to the cause & so we’re able to begin our enterprise. We agreed together that the net proceeds would be donated to Ramkrishna Mission, Kolkata who were already doing such outstanding community service. Here we are, flagging off our fundraiser in the hope that all of you will come forward & do whatever is possible to raise funds for people in Bengal whose lives have been destroyed.
‘Nature As I See’| আমার ভূবন
Arunima Chowdhury
5th June 2020 – 30th June 2020
‘Nature As I See’ an online exhibition presenting the recent paintings by Arunima Choudhury reveals the many shades of her love of nature. The love of nature came early on for Arunima, but it was after her fateful encounter with the works of the Santiniketan artists that she gradually developed her aesthetic appreciation of nature. She, like the artists of Santiniketan, showed a profound love for landscape and natural beauty; their visions of nature are, however, often dissimilar. Nature for Arunima is not just a piece of geography but something personal, revealing a close bond between the human and natural worlds. It is often conceived as feminine and maternal, an embodiment of the qualities that a mother possesses. Nature, existing both within and outside us, is in constant motion; Arunima succeeds in capturing the layers of emotions and dynamism at the level of both image and medium. The naturally produced dyes with which she paints are not just a new medium for her, but a language that gives palpability and organic feeling to her paintings. Colour has a unique presence in Arunima’s organic paintings; it is not used simply to distinguish forms.
BLACK WHITE AND MORE | A Selective Online Exhibition by Emami Art
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
Helen Keller
Our country is going through a challenging time, but we are sure that we can overcome this hurdle by staying positive. Being confined to the four walls of your house for days on end is not easy, but our minds are free and our imaginations have no limit. We at Emami Art want to spread positivity and happiness as we believe that optimism is the only way to overcome these difficult times. Beyond the black and white that we are seeing now we believe and hope that there is more.
“BLACK WHITE AND MORE” is a selective online exhibition by Emami Art showcasing some of the finest monochromatic artworks of Jogen Chowdhury, Rabin Mondal, S. G. Vasudev, Dashrath Patel, Bose Krishnamachari and Manu Parekh. In these artworks you will see what happens when these great artists put away their colourful palettes and instead focus only on shades of black, white and some more, the result is more liberating than it sounds. You can perceive details you didn’t notice before – textures, and new meanings.
Starting Date: Starting 20th April 2020
Extend A Hand – An online exhibition to raise funds for the ongoing pandemic
Covid – 19
Extend A Hand – an online exhibition of 120 artworks
About Emami Art
A destination for Modern & cutting- edge Contemporary Art, Emami Art is a one-of-a- kind art space built in keeping with international standards. Positioned as a key destination for artists, visitors and art collectors, the gallery aligns with the Emami Group’s mission to support artists & artisans and contribute to society’s wellbeing. A regular programme of curated exhibitions, includes the works of new talents and eminent masters of regional, national and international repute, that aligns with the promoters’ ideology that while the popular contributes to the academic, the academic uplifts the popular. Spearheaded by Richa Agarwal, Emami Art’s new 10,000 sq.ft. art space is located in the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), a state-of-the-art multi-disciplinary interactive art centre, off Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, Kolkata, India.
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