Not a Dream, Not Peace, Not Love
Recent works by Arindam Chatterjee
February 23 – April 30, 2024
5th Floor, Emami Art
Kolkata-based noted painter Arindam Chatterjee is known for his highly experimental and critical works, reflecting our fragile existence in a time of mindless violence, anomie, arbitrary power rule and repression. The exhibition includes his extensive body of paintings –most never shown before– created between 2017 and 2023.
Chatterjee, who studied art in Kolkata and Santiniketan, began his career as a successful abstract artist, which he abandoned around 2007 and gradually moved towards figurative art. The paintings in the show show his highly experimental yet easily recognizable style, crossing elements of expressive abstraction with powerful realism. In contemporary art historical discourse, he is close to the group of artists, writers and poets who, in a highly critical-poetic manner and through the depiction of brutal facts, images and emotions, try to capture the true faces of civilization, which turns into its opposite and becomes barbaric. His work, mostly on paper, shows non-conventional, non-functionalist medium use and material experimentation, addressing, to some extent, the bare life and Schimittan's notion of emergency and state of exception.
Jibananda Das's famous poem, Bodh, inspired the show's title. Chatterjee loves literature, and his reading of Dostoveksky and Kafka, along with Jibanananda Das, Binoy Majumdar, Utpal Kumar Basu and many other modernist writers and poets of Bengal, has significantly shaped his aesthetic ideology. The title indicates indeterminacy and the perpetual movement in signification that lies at the heart of his work.
The exhibition on the 5th floor of Emami Art will be on view through March 23, 2024.
Statement by Richa Agarwal, CEO, Emami Art
Arindam Chatterjee, one of our finest artists, prefers to work, staying away from the limelight. We have been showing his works for a long time, and are delighted to host his first and largest solo exhibition at Emami Art. I am particularly fond of his influential works on paper depicting man's incredible inhumanity and our fragile existence in a fractured world affected by war, violence and injustice. Instead of representing violence and human pathos in any straightforward manner, he connects them to the core of social, political and even ethical life and existence through his unique style, figuration and medium use. The impact of his paintings always stay with us and do not fade from memory with time. I believe that art lovers, critics and students will enjoy the exhibition and enliven the artistic discourse about representing the pain of others in an image-dominated world.
