The Studio remains a major platform for professional and upcoming artists in town. Expectedly, the participants in their exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts have defined modernity in idioms that are both abstract and figurative, depending on their personal predilections. In terms of the mediums chosen, too, they have felt free to load their palette without inhibition, although not with the same degree of virtuosity and imagination. The most creative of these artists include Anuradha Bysack (oil), Maitreyee Chatterjee (acrylic) and Prabir Kumar Mazumder (acrylic). Das’s Compositions, Mazumdar’s Serenity and John Lawrence’s Celebration-I deserve particular mention in terms of the artists’ cultivated search for the abstract ideas hidden in space.

Samir Dasgupta

If photography is ‘writing with light’, its soul is the ‘seeing eye’ and what breathes life into it is the intuitive sense of composition, then Mala Mukherjee does “dabble in photography,” as she confesses in the leaflet available at the Academy of Fine Arts gallery where she exhibited 57 prints. Her modest admission to dabbling extends to printing as well, and therefore, a clutch of prints displayed her new-found penchant in digital dabbling. All the captions were in Bengali lines of poetry, with English alternatives available with her. That Mukherjee has a happy eye and composes with patience and time was evident. Even two forlorn benches in the park, Pasapasi bosibar/In the Park, or a closeup of a broken structure, Singhadwar/The Red Door, radiates an excited sense of lighting and composition rather than a brooding mood. The most exhilarating example of this was Tirer Toru/By the Pond.

Anil Grover

Krantik Art Forum has to its credit a three-decade-long, uninterrupted record of publication of a juvenile periodical, Aalor Phulki. The recently-ended exposition of seven painters, many of whom are exploring the twilight-area creativity linking poetry and visual art, has been the latest offering of Krantik. Of these artists, Pradip Ghosh and Pallab Kanti Mitra are the best known, whose pictorial works are inspired by a strong lyrical vibrancy, albeit without being illustrative or narrative. What the exhibition mounted by Gaga-nendra Pradarshasala lacked, however, was the expertise of a curator who could eliminate some of the haphazardly accommodated entries not worth being displayed at all.

SDG