The Birla Academy of Art and Culture is one of the two major institutions in Calcutta that give awards annually to the best painters, printmakers and sculptors. The current exhibition of the award-winners includes 10 works of each winner. Jyotirmoy Ash from Hooghly, winner of the best painting in the non-water colour category, splits his oeuvre into mix media items (Old Doctrine) and acrylic works (Myth), while Soumitra Kar of Howrah presents his neatly created water colour- and tempera-based pictorial designs in contrasting colours, which are a bit over-symmetrical to suit contemporary taste. Varanasi-based Krishna Nag’s landscapic works in fibre glass hold out newer aesthetic possibilities in the field of tactile three-dimensional expressions.
Samir Dasgupta
Last Friday Spotlight presented an hour-long play-reading programme in the Lincoln Room of the American Center. As expected, the group chose three one-act plays by contemporary American playwrights. David Ives’ The Philadelphia was the lightest and the sunniest of the three. It was overshadowed by the black humour of Murray Schisgal’s First Love which pits a husband who returns to a volatile wife who refuses to find any rationale in his words until she learns about his fatal illness and decides to promote his autobiography as a literary agent. Shel Silverstein’s What Are You Doing There? was a trifle disturbing in content and disappointing in execution. Lack of communication and an overwhelming impatience in a maddening social fabric underlined this meticulously crafted production. The climax could have been far more chilling if not frightening.
Anshuman Bhowmick
Chitrakoot Art Gallery has mounted two promising painters’ recent creative output. Arun Goswami’s work is realistic to the last detail but is fantasy-laden in its atmospherics. The series titled Drama of Life, presented on the occasion, does not fly away from reality, but the artist seeks to express the dramatic aspects of life charged with the inherent vibrancy of nature surrounding human existence. The romantic is not easily separable from the symbolic. Of particular interest is My Studio (oil) which depicts in delectable chia-roscuro the artist’s masculine self appearing on a bull’s back. Avishankar Mitra’s stylised mixed-media configurations evo-ked the tone and mood of a puppet show, or of a child’s nursery visited by adults.
SDG
