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Ramananda Bandyopadhyay
is one of the most eminent living painters of the Bengal School. He is a disciple of Acharya Nandalal Bose, who was himself the earliest and most prominent disciple of Abanindranath Tagore. Bandyopadhyay's life and work are imbued with a mature mystic sensibility, which expresses itself through a delicate and restrained lyricism in his paintings, achieved through color and a firm-toned supple rhythmic line. According to Bandyopadhyay, the artist must train his perception to see spiritual beauty in all things, the aim of his depiction being the aesthetic grace of divine emergence, lavanya. He also prefers the miniature scale and style. In his words, "There is a common misconception that there is more value to a large painting than to a small one. After the external expansion of perception through the senses, we draw inwards and discover all the world in seed form within, in the light of a tiny flame." Bandyopadhyay lives in Calcutta, the capital of cultural and political resurgence in India, where he is among the most celebrated artists and where he is also a regular contributor to the prestigious Bengali newspaper Bortoman. |
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Shyamali Khastagir
is the daughter of Shri Sudhir Khastagir, one of the major artists of the Bengal School, famous for introducing an emphatic rhythmic abstraction into the works of this genre. In this, Khastagir follows the footsteps of her father, her paintings organizing themselves through swirling color lines, full of a joyful dynamism. The series, "Woman, Child and Bird" shows the exploration of personal metaphors to express the relationship of the modern Indian woman artist with spiritual freedom. Khastagir grew up and lives in poet Rabindranath Tagore's ashram in Shantiniketan, and spends much of her time in nearby villages of Bengal and Bihar, where she works with the women in reviving their traditional arts. In her paintings, she experiments with different natural media, commonly earth colors and clay. |
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Sandip Suman Bhattacharya
is a young gold medallist from the Government Art College in Calcutta. Bhattacharya paints in acrylics, experimenting with various techniques. He is essentially a romantic painter, concerned with nature, history and folklore. In this exhibit, his involvement with history manifests in symbolic interpretations of the spiritual personages, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. |
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Biswarup Dutta
is a disciple of the celebrated Bengal-school artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, and lives in Bankura, a seat of traditional culture in Bengal. He paints on paper using mixed media, including natural pigments. Datta has developed an unique iconic style of depicting Puranic and folk mythological figures, which combines the decorative figuration of traditional Bengali folk design, alpona, with the geometric abstraction and symbolism of Tantra. He utilizes rare, earthy color tones in an impasto style to create effects reminiscent of folk traditions. Since 1974, he has participated in many major art exhibits in India. |
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Amrita Banerji
lives in a Sri Aurobindo ashram in Los Angeles, California. She is a great-granddaughter of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the Bengal School. Banerji's work is characterized by a Neo-Tantric simplification of theme into geometric and symbolic forms, supporting a charged visionary and esoteric content. According to her, the act of painting is an open-eyed meditation, in which artist and medium are transported into a trance-like space where the painting appears on paper and receives material fixation through line and color by the artist. Her paintings function as snapshots of metaphysical inner dynamics in the transformative journey of yoga. |
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Dhanavanti
uses oil-pastels to relate strong color-shapes in visionary narratives of dynamic inner transformative processes. The essence of her work is an attempt to communicate the psychic substance of the energies and forms of the recognizable world in interactive immergence or emergence relationships with one another and with the Divine Presence-Power (Shakti). According to her, the perceptions that emerge in her paintings are often triggered by life experiences and are prepared in her, both in waking and meditational states, before "painting themselves out". In the process of painting, she often discovers its meaning. Dhanavanti's personality is intensely conscious, mystic and introspective. She has been a resident of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, since 1943 and has had solo exhibitions in India and Brazil. |
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Priti Ghosh
is a resident of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry in South India, where she studied from childhood under master painters, finally training in oils and watercolors under Shri Sanjiban Biswas. Under Sanjiban, she blossomed into an artist in her own right, finding an authenticity of theme and depiction that speaks directly of her deepest concerns. For Ghosh, art is the expression of visionary states depicting the drama of an inner life, where embodied aspiring forces enact the movements leading to spiritual transformation. Painting in oils on canvas, she combines the executional strength of the western masters with the mysticism and visionary content of India. An intense lyricism sometimes informs her paintings, straining the bounds of form towards abstraction. Ghosh's solo exhibitions in India have been acclaimed by reviewers. |
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Anjan Chakravarty
lives in the city of Benaras, a sacred and perhaps the oldest living city of India. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Benaras Hindu University and is presently a teacher of Visual Arts there. Chakraverty's area of academic research has been the miniature paintings of India, on which subject he is the author of an excellent book. His paintings are visionary landscapes or portraits, often of Upanishadic or Puranic subjects, executed in a miniaturist style on paper, using ink and water color washes and special texturing effects. Chakraverty has held solo exhibitions in Calcutta, Delhi and Kathmandu, and has been featured in numerous exhibits in Asia. |
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Champaklal
was a yogi and the personal attendant of the great modern seer and sage, Sri Aurobindo. Champaklal lived since a young age at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India and died in 1992. Champaklal's 'paintings' are actually experiments in the flow of oils, using the Japanese marbling technique known as suminagashi. In this, the partially random dispersion of color on a fluid base, was treated as a map of processes in consciousness, under the meditative guidance of the yogi. The abstract patterns were often given names by the head of the Ashram and Sri Aurobindo's collaborator, the Mother. |
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Kiran Mehra
lives and works at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. A colleague and close friend of Priti Ghosh, her expressive impulse took an early turn towards abstraction. Mehra's maturity as an artist has been shaped through the discovery of universal textures in the works of nature and of man, in macrocosm and microcosm and her paintings attempt to catch the tread of these "cosmic footprints". In this she does not limit herself to any instrument or medium, manipulating ink, acrylic and earth colors, and using pen, brush, rag, branch, feather or whatever other material may suit the artist's vision. |
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Sridhar Iyer
is a young artist from a South Indian priestly family. Living presently in Bhopal, his initiation into art was inspired by the life and work of the contemporary abstractionist, J. Swaminathan. Iyer explores subtle "event-spaces" in his work, where forces impinge on receptors to create traceries, enigmatic and seriocomic maps and which leave subliminal effects on the viewer. Iyer affirms that these maps are the products of meditation; and that the act of painting has changed his life from one of boisterous aggression to one of repose and of conscious acceptance. His series, "Journey with Lines and Images", merges vastly varied chronological and cultural contexts, being reminiscent at once of aboriginal magical traditions, the cloud-chamber patterns of atomic physics and chromosomal photographs of molecular biology |
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