Chaita Basu Jena’s print

Forty years is not a very long time for an institution to shape up, but Birla Academy has a lot to crow about within this period. For one, it had hosted the unforgettable Rodin exhibition when the gallery had turned into a mela ground. It has organised many memorable exhibitions of both Indian artists and practitioners from abroad.

Birla Academy’s 40th annual exhibition opened with much fanfare on Tuesday. Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi opened the huge exhibition, covering four floors of the building. There are 442 works on show, many of them by well-known artists of this city. There is a host of young artists as well, and it is not easy to tell them apart.

For one, they have not acquired the requisite skills to make their works stand out, and second, many of them are still content to blindly imitate their successful seniors. Birla Academy should have tried to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it obviously has not.

If one has zoomed in on a work one has found interesting, it inevitably turns out to be the work of a known name. Most of the works without a familiar signature are quite sad pieces, one has to admit. The exhibits lack labels and identifying each artist is a difficult task, as one has to open the catalogue every time one views a painting.

However, there are some paintings by artists not so well known that I liked. Arghya Priya Majumdar of Santiniketan exhibits a large canvas of a monster trying to wring its own neck, or so it seems. It is grotesque enough to stand out in this crowd of pallid shadows. Sandip Roy’s Hillscape and Pratima Seal’s tectonic drawing, I thought, are muted enough to deserve a brief mention.

The graphics section is nice. Chaita Basu Jena’s (a pond with some skeletal fish) and Jayati Sinha’s (a strange beast resembling a Christmas tree looking up) are rather neat exercises. This is, admittedly, a rather hasty judgment, but looking for good work in that huge avalanche of mediocrity is like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack.

Of the two well-known artists whose works are quite remarkable are Jaya Ganguly and Aditya Basak. They have never reached such a peak, both in terms of technical finesse and the way in which they have projected their ideas. Katayun Saklat rarely exhibits. Her drawing shows that she should do so more often.