The exhibition features Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri's works on paper from 1985 through 1989 and his recent new creations, including The River in the Sky series (2025), which inspired the show's title. Unlike his first exhibition with Emami Art in 2023, in which we showcased his major works across mediums and styles spanning over five decades, this exhibition focuses on two distinct periods in his life: Bhagalpur, Bihar, and Santiniketan, West Bengal, exploring the relationship between the impact of place, lived experience and abstraction in his works.
After graduating from art college in 1966, Karchaudhuri (b. 1944), one of Bengal's most eminent and prolific contemporary abstract painters, joined the Weavers Service Centre (WSC) and spent the next two decades working at various centres – Banaras, Calcutta, and Bhagalpur. This ‘nomadic’ period, characterised by frequent travel and exploration, was marked by struggle as well as intense experimentation and learning. In 1990, he joined as a faculty member at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, where he has been living ever since. In retrospect, the Bhagalpur drawings on display show continuity and maturity of the style he had developed in Calcutta, and simultaneously, depart from it. The near-abstract bust figures of the Calcutta period found compositional stability and integrity in Bhagalpur, while the rhythm of the slow, placid life in rural Bihar replaced the gloomy shadow of post-Naxalite Calcutta.
After his return from California, USA, where he studied printmaking at San Jose University, Karchaudhuri was posted in Bhagalpur in 1985. He lived in Barari, a remote village, where he found inspiration in a nearby deserted meadow and the local landscape. As he writes in his memoir:
The field lay idle in front of my house. Uneven, covered with weeds, it was of no use. […] I was, however, attracted by the deserted meadow and drew many pictures based on it: the bald date palm, the old horse of the tanga puller, and the purposeless human figures from villages scattered in the field like the upright date palm tree.
Living alone in Barari, Karchaudhuri developed an intimate bond with this field, which profoundly influenced his art. The Barari Woman series showcases how local figures and elongated date palms permeate his abstract compositions. Colour, which was largely absent in his earlier works and would later dominate his works in Santiniketan, made its first significant appearance in Bhagalpur. The brightly clad village women who often came to the quiet and unremarkable meadow might have inspired him to introduce colours in his work, says Karchaudhuri.
Karchaudhuri's arrival in Santiniketan marked a significant turning point in his life as an abstract painter. Initially, he felt rather marginalised within the dominant narrative-figurative tradition of Santiniketan but gradually succeeded in developing a powerful style of abstraction – vibrant, minimal, and expressive. His earlier line-intensive and near-abstract figurative works gave way to paintings that originated not in representation, but in geometric forms, lines, and colour fields.
A casual encounter with folk art, which he recalled in one of our conversations, completely changed the direction of his abstract painting in Santiniketan. In the late 1990s, he chanced upon earthen pots decorated with traditional triangle motifs, sold by villagers in the local bazaar. Desperate to find a new idiom for his abstract art, he found this age-old, familiar motif extraordinary and novel. The initial wonder and joy of discovery endured, and the triangle motif recurred throughout his later work, sometimes prominently recognisable and assertive, and at other times submerged in the layered process of creation. As evident in the paintings on display, he transformed the triangle that moves between primitive art and modern geometry into a fundamental unit and organisational element of his abstract art.
Karchaudhuri composes influential, expressive works that, while being predominantly abstract, bring symbols, gestures, and affect into urgent relation. Santiniketan, with its landscape and natural beauty, resonates through them, transforming personal memories into an exalted experience of colours that convey the artist's unmatched ability to make visible the relationship between lived experience and painting. In his most recent series, The River in the Sky, he returns to the roots of abstraction and its mimetic relationship with nature. These paintings, divided into two integral parts like the earth and the sky, negotiate the threshold between the studio and the outside world, imbued with poetic references to time, place and memories.
Indeed, Karchaudhuri has traversed a complex, highly personal path to abstraction, drawing on elements from both nature and history. More than just a demonstration of formal possibilities, the exhibition reveals how abstraction has enabled the artist to infuse even the most basic compositional structures with new meaning and vitality.
- Arkaprava Bose
