Vichitra, an ensemble exhibition of artists from Bengal, takes its title from the Sanskrit word for the varied, the wondrous, the manifold. The exhibition honours a centuries-old dialogue between the lands we now call Bihar and Bengal, two regions watered by the same river and bound by a shared inheritance of language, art, and song. Long before borders became lines on a map, poets, pilgrims, painters, and wanderers moved freely between these plains, carrying forms and ideas from one bank to the other. Vichitra takes that exchange as its starting point and asks what it still means today.
Presented at the Temporary Gallery, Patna Museum, the exhibition brings together fourteen of our artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, textile, and installation. Their concerns range widely: history, migration, and the texture of memory in the work of Pradip Das; the lives of working people and the labour of the land in Prasanta Sahu, Anjan Modak, and Soma Das; the natural-colour paintings of Arunima Choudhury; abstraction and formal exploration in Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri and Suman Dey; the disciplined spontaneity of Partha Pratim Deb's ink and colour; the tactile language of Ujjal Dey; the painterly urgency of Arindam Chatterjee; the patient, critical lens of Kushal Ray's photography; and the structural intelligence of natural forms in Tapas Biswas's sculpture. The exhibition also includes Lalit Mohan Sen and Kartick Chandra Pyne, two historically significant artists whose eclectic practices, spanning the pre- and post-Independence decades, combined local and regional elements with the international currents of their time.
What holds these artists together is a still-breathing weave of people, practice, language, and land. Vichitra is imagined as a gesture of hospitality, bringing fourteen artistic worlds to Patna and inviting the public to spend time with each of them.
The exhibition is presented by the Bihar Museum, organised in collaboration with Emami Art and Kolkata Centre for Creativity.
