Shanu Lahiri has long occupied an uneasy position in Indian art history — not from lack of merit, but because her practice resisted easy categorisation. Anonymous?, now on view at Galerie 88, is a rare and vital reintroduction to an artist for whom art was not performance or profession but instinct. Lahiri drew as one might breathe, freely, compulsively, on whatever surface was available. This exhibition pays tribute to that quiet, daily radicalism.
Curated by Nobina Gupta, the show presents an eclectic selection — cubist sculptural experiments, intimate works, and a large scroll — that sketches a portrait of an artist never bound by style or scale. Her sculptural figures, in particular, echo the angular formalism of Picasso, yet they are her own: rooted in gesture, distortion, and a searching engagement with form. Two never-before-seen paintings of construction workers evoke Fernand Léger’s industrial figures, but unlike Léger’s idealised forms, Lahiri’s workers remain tethered to the lived realities of Calcutta’s transforming cityscape. These are not heroic labourers but real bodies caught in flux, observed with empathy and clarity.
One of the most telling exhibits is a fishbone diagram of Rashbehari Avenue (picture). It is skeletal not in what it lacks, but in how it holds together the memory of a living structure: homes of writers, singers, painters, actors — all mapped as if to prevent forgetting. The drawing is both taxonomy and elegy, not to a vanished world but to one still flickering beneath the new.
The Parama statue maquette, once a visible part of Calcutta’s E.M. Bypass, now sits here like an archaeological memory, gently challenging the city’s cultural amnesia. She painted bylanes with slum children, taught students by working alongside them, and always welcomed creative mess. Her rejection of anonymity was not self-assertion but an embrace of others. Each sketch and scribble binds us to her evolving Calcutta and the life around. To see Lahiri’s work now is to realise how much we missed while looking elsewhere. Her art waits for someone to stop, look, and think with her. That time, at last, has come.