CIMA’s annual Summer Show is an occasion to ponder the trajectory that modern Indian art, its pioneers and their styles and influences have taken over the decades. This year’s exhibition, Shifting Paradigms, 1980s-2025 (on view till August 2), opens with a dramatic and imposing piece by Paresh Maity, who captures Benares at its moody best. A sketch by M.F. Husain from the Nightwatch series, a figure sketch by Akbar Padamsee, a charming Ganesha by Amar Nath Sehgal, Jyoti Bhatt’s intricate intaglio, Somnath Hore’s poignant depiction of a mother and child during the famine, K.G. Subramanyan’s lush reverse painting, Lalu Prasad Shaw’s spruced up Babu and Ganesh Pyne’s elaborate jottings on graph paper set the stage for the show. These masterworks underlined the various styles and the idioms that the younger artists exhibited have grown up consuming and appreciating.
The products of such fecund inspiration are expectedly fruitful. Take Kingshuk Sarkar’s Bastab (picture, left), for instance; although the only overlap with Hore would be loosely thematic — they both capture the cruel face of reality — one can find parallels in how the two artists use dark, red and brown paint to evoke dried blood. Similarly, both Jaya Ganguly and Samir Aich strip the outer adornments of man and animal alike to show them in all their grotesque corporeality. The painstakingly hand-stitched minutiae of landscapes on Shreyasi Chatterjee’s canvases caught the pulse of Bengal’s countryside, while Arpita Basu’s playful cityscape and Ankan Bandyopadhyay’s study of suburban houses were both whimsical and observant. Roul Hemanta’s use of negative space to mark out the nitty-gritty of life in the slums was as clever as it was astute. Chandan Bez Baruah’s woodcut triptych was the most stunningly detailed landscape — reminiscent of Haren Das’s dexterous equilibrium of black and white — in the show. Other artists who zoomed in on the complexities of life were Arunangshu Roy in his playful piece put together from waste paper and Sumanta Chowdhury in his quaint, miniature-esque landscapes.
An artwork by Sumanta Chowdhury Source: CIMA Art Gallery
Others zoomed out to look at the bigger picture: Pradip Rakshit’s thickly-coated oil paintings, Yogesh Dashrath Murkute’s bird’s-eye-view of a real world cleaved into little pieces, Kuntal Dutta and Santanu Roy’s impressionist landscapes admired the beauty of looking at life from afar and the perspective that comes with this. Suvanwita Saha’s installation was chilling and eerie like a catacomb. Kalpana Vishwas’s topographical map made of clay was a stark reminder of the futility of marking territory, while Suman Chandra created an X-ray of a miner’s foot with coal dust to map the textures of both the earth that he works on and the skin of a manual labourer. Dipa Moni Patowary, Rimi Adak and Suhani Jain lavished attention on the beauty of geological details that are often overlooked. Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar’s Ephemeral Waves was poetic in how it captured the sight and the feel of a receding wave and the debris that can be seen through it.
There is more. CIMA’s ongoing Summer Show has a wider array of works that force viewers to look at that which we miss but the artistic eye does not.