Paris-based painter Anju Chaudhury tarvels a lot but comes to Kolkata almost each year to share her creative exultations with people whom she knows the best. Her current exposition at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture is different from the earlier ones in that it also contains specimens of her early works dating back to the sixties.

A couple of academic-style portraits from life, rendered in oil, as well as a few impeccable pen-and-ink drawings from illustrations she once did for a well-known anthology of poems, In Praise of Krishna, will have struck a chord in some of the artist’s contemporaries.

Anju has done well to sort out and hang together groups of paintings, graphics (including monoprints) and paper-pulp pictorial constructs, not in any chronological order but according to countries where she created them. These are, therefore, classified under such place names as Paris, Holland, Finland, London, Morocco—and, of course, Kolkata and Baroda.

As always, Anju’s present oeuvre betrays her predilection for the flora rather than the fauna, because of the inherent rhythmic possibilities discoverable in the natural shapes of leaves, petals and bushes as well as the colours that define such shapes.

Of special interest among the exhibits are the Wind Blows series, imaginatively crafted in combination of oil, pastel and water colour, on elongated and hanging rice- paper sheets.

The Birla Academy of Art and Culture has in recent years featured several Delhi-based artists in symbolic gesture to their long-standing interaction with Kolkata artists. The role of Bengal’s painters and sculptors in making Delhi a centre of modern art can be traced as far back as the pre-Independence era. The increasing migration of Kolkata’s artists in recent decades has reinforced the cultural dialogue between the two metropolises.

The Academy’s latest venture in the shape of a solo exhibition of works of the young painter Neeraj Goswami thus deserves to be lauded by the cognoscenti of this city. There are many interesting aspects worth taking note of in Goswami’s style and technique of composition. For one thing, his remarkable sense of colour scheme, almost invariably prompted by his proneness to warm shades of basic colours, is enriched by their luminosity. Secondly, his manner of piecing together such strongly coloured areas around the central images (usually human faces or groups of figures), painted in subdued shades of brown and off-white, may well be looked upon as a variation on analytical cubism a la Braque and Picasso.

The third characteristic of Goswami’s pictorial constructs is the virtual absence of perspective or ambient details — either textural or involving other visuals. His works (in oil, oil pastel and water colour) are figurative without being strictly narrative, let alone representational.