A watercolour, Two Women Two Men, by Arpita Singh

Two women are positioned diagonally opposite each other. With bulky bodies, they are both naked. One faces the viewer. Her arms form a cradle and her lacerated face resembles that of an actor in a Noh drama.

The other has her back turned towards the viewer, like Ingres’s statuesque bathers. Only this woman’s flesh makes no attempt at resisting the gravitational pull any longer. She spreads one leg out and her head rests on one hand in the attitude of the thinker. Traced out in the torsos of both women are their rib cages.

At the other two corners of the frame are two tiny men — one seated on a chair, and the other bending over and stretching out his hand in a pleading attitude. In this tightly knit watercolour, Arpita Singh creates a rich haze of soothing colours such as aquamarine, brick red and green. It is a comforting painting that holds the promise of shelter and care.

It is a pity that CIMA’s Summer Show has only one work of this painter, considered one of the most important artists on the contemporary Indian art scene.

Yogesh Rawal has homes in both Mumbai and Bhopal. His works show much restraint in the use of colour and lines. In the work on display, Rawal uses various shades of charcoal grey to paint vertical bands of varying breadth on rectangular board.

In between the charcoal bands are rectangles of lighter grey, with a sky blue overlapping the sombre shade. Together, they create the impression of the night sky viewed through the bars of a window and of serenity.

Jaya Ganguly’s large mixed media work — black lines on white backdrop — is more of a drawing, really. This artist has in the past created violently distorted images of she-monstresses that approach caricatures.

Here, she has created a chimera who is a veiled woman with numerous feline paws appearing from underneath the patterned cloth. Faceless as she is, she is an embodiment of mystery instead of fear.

There are works by Manu Parekh, Ganesh Pyne, Jatin Das and Jogen Chowdhury, but what strikes the viewer is a large canvas by Kingshuk Sarkar.

This young artist was trained in Japan, where he picked up an exotic mode of painting. His red looks as bright as fresh blood, but the image of a torso hanging from a coat hanger has been seen before.

Sumitro Basak’s body stretching across the length of the canvas, like that of a yoga practitioner, is quite striking but only because the contrasting colours he uses — green and red — are dazzling. This is no crime, but a work of art should have other dimensions than graphic design alone.

Shakila’s collage is wonderfully detailed. It is a miracle how she creates such nuanced works, using scraps of torn paper. It is a tiny work showing a beggar woman in a typical rural scene. How evocatively she has conjured up life in a small village! And she does this quite successfully in works of all dimensions.

Pampa Panwar remembers the mango trees in Santiniketan, where she lives. These luscious fruits hang in clusters, but they remind her of the adverts of fruit juices and a straw promptly appears on the canvas. As in her earlier works, reality is multi-layered in which several episodes of experience can come together, often with ironic results.

Sreyashi Chatterjee uses the feminine crafts of stitching and embroidery to produce her takes on domesticity and workaday reality. Earlier, her works used to be small. Now they have spread out and have broken out of the confines of home.

She presents two works here, one of which evokes her secret garden with its perfect square patch of green in the middle, surrounded by flower beds, along with suggestions of honeycombs. A huge, fat slug crawls across and birds wing their way home. This is the perfect sylvan setting. She has used thread-and-needle as well as a pen to create the forms.

Her other work depicts a playful Hanuman carrying the huge hill when he could not find the herb that was meant to revive Lakshman in a dead swoon. She uses bright contrasting shades, such as hot pink, yellow and blue, but Sumitro Basak, too, has created a similar flying langur. Artists should be more careful about using iconic images.