Sangeeta Kumar Murthy creates a universe in which the desire to live has wings by establishing the heartbeats of life between the natural and artificial worlds. She blurs the line between the Real world and the world of imagination and focuses to represents a universal life. Sangeeta depicts a world that most people do not experience while living in. In her paintings and sketches, using allegorical symbols, unknown faces, and occasionally a human body without a Face, she tries to capture the deep human sensitivities at the point where living life and experiencing that life intersect.
As an artist, Sangeeta has a deep interest in expressing the various stages of human life, including both the physical and mental states. Her paintings show an emotional journey between the physical world. She defines human character and behavior with great precision. She travels to different places to meet people and study their nature, culture, and environment. She minutely studies the psychology of people, their dreams, desires, hopes, and disappointments. Then she converts them into painting, that not only captivates the viewers but also gives them the vision to understand their own lives. To create this vision, Sangeeta often chooses metaphors that are around us. These metaphors include houses, flowers, birds, trees, rivers, and mountains. She places both the natural and the artificial worlds together and establishes the interdependence, rather the inevitability of coexistence, between the two.
Building Dreams was her first series that focused on different structures of buildings and the concept of home. There is a big difference between Building and home. The building is just a structure that converts into a home where people live together. The presence of women in the building structure in this series makes the painting more sensitive. The paintings of this series were multi-dimensional. In these paintings, she presented the interior of any building more realistically, but in its outer environment, she expressed the complexities of life by resorting to abstraction. In this series, she has expressed moods and emotions through attractive structures. Some of the paintings of this series are also good examples of Minimal Art.
The pieces in this series exhibit a kind of philosophy and realities of Life. Man has made the world around him big and alluring, yet there is also a sense of lifelessness in some parts of it. To breathe life into the dead structures of the buildings, Sangeeta inserted abstract feminine characters in this series of paintings.
The texture and toner value of colors are her specialty. When she shifted to realistic paintings, in her next series, ‘Verve’, and then ‘Dreams’, texture played a point of attraction. Her figures look simple and situated in a complex environment. The paintings also express the contrary condition in the life of a woman. The human figure is just a symbol like buildings, flowers, and other motifs to convey the thought. The articulation of figures and buildings gives a new dimension to her creation. It will be more powerful when she works on ‘Rhythm of Life’ popular series of her. in that she depicts emotions and the journey of life through the dancing movements of the feet. Vibrant colors and flowers with background textures play a significant role in this series. All paintings are so joyful and Enthusiastic.
From Rhythm of Life, she progressed to Spiritual Exploration with a focus on inner life and emotional reality, with the turtles taking Prominence in her paintings. In ancient times, turtles and tortoises were thought to bring good health, longevity, and protection from evil. Turtles in Indian culture also have great significance as Lord Vishnu is said to have taken the form of a Turtle to uphold the earth and its beings and the second avatar Kurma in the Satyuga (Era of Truth).
The Works “Joy of Life” showcases the Inner feeling of all humans to have a successful healthy long life. A turtle has a mythical as well as a moral symbol in the Indian context. In some paintings of that series she mixed her old elements like buildings but in different styles, as well as she uses some patterns and symbols from folk art and creates a bridge between contemporary and folk art.
In her new series Life Within, she appears to be taking her craft further. This series is reminiscent of her Rhythm of Life series in which in many paintings expressed by showing only the feet. In many works of the Life Within series, the faces of human bodies are not visible, but their body postures and the environment around them give a sense of lyrical aliveness. In this series, she has created man-made space and natural space rhythmically in many works. The color scheme of these paintings made on paper and canvas gives a sense of peace. The structure of village houses in some of these paintings emphasizes the importance of simplicity over grandeur, which is completely situated in the natural environment.
In her art journey of more than three decades, she always accepted new challenges of new mediums and subjects for expression. Refusing to be bound by any genre, She has preferred to work according to the subject. In the history of world art, we find examples of many such artists including Picasso who changed their style for effective expression because only by doing this the art remains dynamic. Sangeeta has also maintained dynamism in her art by breaking inertia. For this, she has shown the courage to leave her popular series and work on a new subject in a different style, which is seen in very few artists.
