The second annual exhibition of Aakriti Art Gallery, Gen Next II (October 2-15), included works by several contemporary artists from different parts of the country. These painters and sculptors, all below forty, come from different academic traditions and engage in distinctive, and sometimes radical, experiments with form and content.

With respect to the thematic and formal choices made by most of the artists, the desire to look beyond abstraction into the heart of the real was palpable. Particularly with the sculptures, the shift of visual interest seemed to be from obscure symbols to more instantly recognizable allegorical forms. Bengal-2007, a wood-and-stone sculpture by Akhil Chandra Das, depicts the carcass of a fish with cats feeding on it. Although a trifle sentimental, the idea was striking nonetheless. In contrast, Ashish Ghosh’s Neo-Fish came across as flat and unappealing.

Arya Oraw assembled steel plates and iron scrap to produce mechanical creatures, reminiscent of lego art minus its infantile charm. Chandan Bhandari’s Curiosity, showing metal rats scuttling across marble pages, looked rather bluntly literal. S. Gopinath carves a profile of the Buddha out of fibreglass in Redemption Song-2. The work is made to appear deliberately unfinished. The quietly sagacious face emerges out of the surrounding blackness, a sculpting hammer lies around. As a work-in-progress within a larger work of art, it makes a self-reflexive statement on the nature of creativity.

Subrata Biswas and Tapas Biswas both use bronze with different effects. The former chooses relatively uncomplicated themes (as in Durga and Joy of Nature), while the latter combines technical mastery with a dizzyingly complicated vision. In Inter Alia and Ghat, Tapas explores the potentials of his medium in detail to capture amazing nuances of human life. He excels in Ha-Gen, where thousands of tiny human figures hold on to each other to form a giant tree. With the open mouths and stick-like bodies, this disturbing web of humanity certainly looked eerie.

Both Suvajit Samanta and Sujit Kumar Karan appeared rather clumsy with terracotta, while Tarun Maity’s Choko-Mother — which harks back to indigenous toys — offered a sedate interlude from the more intense and disturbing images. Of the latter, Apu Dasgupta’s Never Ending Combat (picture right) is reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The throbbing red on the canvas vividly reflects the anguish on the face.

Ankur Khare’s mysterious untitled works depict a combination of pots, pans and perhaps just the hint of a few human eyes — sometimes real, sometimes looking spectral. The sense of a mystery is also there in Debasis Barui’s Dusk to Dawn and Self Minded, with the assemblage of visible and transparent bodies, all of them connected to a situation that remains critically unresolved.

Balaka Bhattacharjee and Dipak Kundu do away with such deep anxieties. Both of them react to industrialization in their own terms. For Bhattacharjee, industrial revolution is to be countered by a Return to Nature, which she conveys through the touching image of a woman embracing huge stretches of greenery with open arms. Kundu prefers to relocate the mythical past — gods and goddesses of temple art and architecture — in a starkly mechanized setting. The result, sadly, is rather hideous.

Avijit Dutta reacts to civilization and its discontents by re-visiting the past as well. In The Sting (picture left), a dead fly is found stuck to the page of an ancient notebook. The illegible scrawl on the sepia-tinted paper, the translucent wings of the insect and a tiny brown leaf are bizarrely intertwined: it is as if, along with the fly, a moment from the past has also been irredeemably trapped here.

Mithun Dasgupta and Jayanta Kumar Paul use magic realism but clutter up their canvases needlessly. Madhuri Khare and Nobina Gupta work in beautifully abstract modes. Possibly influenced by Jaya Ganguly, Gupta’s works stood out for their tranquil sublimity.