Deeply psychological yet rooted in shared human experience, this suite of around thirty works by Arindam Chatterjee probes profound human ethics while engaging with Irish artist Francis Bacon’s idea of the “Brutality of Fact.” Bacon believed that by distorting figures and infusing elements of the grotesque and the macabre, his work became more truthful to the intensity of life.
Chatterjee paints snarling animals cradled in arms or lying against sleeping figures yet baring their teeth at the onlooker; human forms with missing limbs and facial features; heads that appear distinctly non-human; devastated barren lands; corpses; enormous birds; and scenes of devouring, struggle, and mourning. All are rendered with the self-assuredness of an artist who knows precisely what he is doing, yet resists explaining his motives. Roland Barthes would approve—for this author isn’t “dead” but firmly insists on the birth of the reader.
A devoted admirer of film noir—particularly its cynicism, loneliness, and ambiguity—and of filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Ingmar Bergman, Chatterjee draws on Tarkovsky to articulate his approach. “A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image,” Tarkovsky remarked in 1983, “An image—as opposed to a symbol—is indefinite in meaning.” Chatterjee’s paintings similarly transcend literal interpretation. He pushes back against the restrictive monolith of the symbol, refusing to be held accountable for his intentions or to burden the viewer with them.
Chatterjee began his career as an abstract painter in the 1990s, shifting toward figuration in the mid-2000s. His powerful, often unsettling images of humans, animals, and hybrid man-animal forms are deeply entwined with social, political, and cultural realities. Over the past two decades, he has developed a distinctive visual language—combining richly layered pigment and experimental media with striking images of pathos and irony.
The Jijñāsā (the desire to know) series features massive birds standing upright, their wings anchoring them to the ground rather than aiding flight. These birds loom over hybrid human-animal forms—standing, seated, or lying supine. Their gaze is quiet and direct, at once bearing witness to the state of the world and questioning its inhabitants. The figure of the bird recalls “The Standover Man,” the illustrated story within Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, drawn by Max Vandenburg, a Jewish man hiding in a German family’s basement during WWII. The Encounters series, too, stages various interactions: man with animal, man with man, man with corpse, animal with viewer. Chatterjee bends, buckles, and berates the human form, corrupting and contorting what is considered “normal,” evoking jijñāsā, terror, and menace.
The title অ ব মা ন ব follows Rabindranath Tagore’s usage in Shabdo Chayan, where the poet coined the term to translate “sub-man” or “sub-human”—denoting an existence between that of a base animal and a fully enlightened human being. The exhibition traverses this critical space of the sub-human, as Chatterjee reflects on the moral decay of humanness in the socio-political climate of our times—a deterioration that, to the artist, is at once crude and absurd.
Encountering these recent works is to witness the artist’s singular pictorial strategies for tearing down the stable representational veils that conceal the facts of human existence, opening up a visual world that is unfinished, unfamiliar, and disquieting.
BIO
Arindam Chatterjee (b. 1972) studied painting at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata and Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.
His solo exhibitions include Not a Dream, Not Peace, Not Love at Emami Art, Kolkata, 2024; The Lightning Should Have Struck Me, Gandhara Art Gallery, Kolkata, 2015; Recent Work by Arindam Chatterjee, Akar Prakar, Kolkata, 2012; Monologues, Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2006; and The Airborne Stories, Chitrakoot Art Gallery, Kolkata, 2005. His group exhibitions include All That is Hidden, Emami Art, Kolkata, 2024; India Art Fair 2025, 2024, 2023, and 2022; Art Mumbai 2024; Constellations, Emami Art, Kolkata, 2020; and Black Hole Project, Art Multi-Discipline, Kolkata, 2018; among others.
Chatterjee was awarded the Navonmesha Puraskara in 2003, the National Cultural Scholarship and Junior Research Fellowship from the Government of India, the H K Kejriwal Memorial Award in 1997, and the Silver Prize in the Drawing and Design Exhibition in Kyoto, Japan.
He lives and works in Kolkata, India.
