It's only expected that a group such as the Society of Contemporary Artists would be involved in Calcutta's first art festival, CIMA Awards, 2017. In effect, with two shows. One at their small little gallery and the other, hosted by Art Multi-disciplines, at its newer and smaller space in Bijoygarh, focused on printmaking.

Obviously, therefore, smallness is their keynote with the exception of quite an imposing woodcut by Srikanta Paul at AM. The big surprise of the first show is Bimal Kundu, who traded the sculptor's tools for a vigorous, fastidious pen, knitting dense cross-hatchings and scribbles into the gaunt facets of his signature heads (picture). Ink gets fluent variations from Ganesh Haloi and Manoj Dutta, while Manu Parekh gives it a sweeping flourish. Aditya Basak's figures trapped by menacing talons, Pradip Maitra's misted watercolours, Atanu Bhattacharjee's rugged topographies and Partha Dasgupta's tongue-in-cheek Scissors are engaging.

Aiming at an Exordium on printmaking, AM plays a video on the techniques of woodcut and etching and displays the matrices, too. The surprise here are six works from the 1960s by Suhas Roy, who represents the seniors. Atin Basak, who's also curated the show, exemplifies the middle generation with his textured, disembodied, sculpturesque heads, while the younger Paul is an artist to watch out for, both for his mocking tone and his detailing.

Two other collateral shows confirmed the contemporary trend of migration to alternative material in art practice. At the Taj Bengal, for instance, sculptor Shyamal Roy puts vases together to create a towering woman with opera glasses. And Sougata Das assembles, like a mosaic, grotesque heads with snarling jaws and killing teeth, using pieces of glistening 'fibre mirror'.

At Gem Cinema, Prasanta Sahu plaits strands of newspaper for a captivating tapestry, while the weathered timber and rusted scrap metal of Veena Bhargava's virile assemblage seem to have been hauled ashore from shipwreck flotsam. Shreyasi Chatterjee combines embroidery, appliqué, paint and pen to cast a subtle spell with stretches of space and quaint motifs. Kingshuk and Rashmi Sarkar have long formed an alliance with Nature for their art and this time stains of iron rust, eucalyptus leaves, myrobalan and Japanese carbon enrich their canvas and quilted cotton. However, Sumitro Basak, who took his own life in January, remained faithful to acrylic and yet scripted a stark, disturbing, haunting subtext of absence for an apparently everyday scene: washing fluttering on a line, uncollected, and a pair of forlorn spectacles. Its title? Shattered.

The shows are on till March 4.