GLORIOUS 61 YEARS OF CALCUTTA PAINTERS By Anindya Roy

There was an interesting exhibition recently held by Calcutta Painters, one of the oldest artist groups in Bengal, celebrating their 61st Annual Exhibition titled “Climacteric” at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata. This group has gifted Bengal with many eminent artists, including Jogen Chowdhury, Bijon Chowdhury, Prokash Karmaker, and Nikhil Biswas, who were also among the founding members. Their collective artistic journey has always expressed deep concern for nature, society, and the evolving human condition. The impact of climate change and emotional shifts in contemporary life are captured through the artists’ creative processes. Alongside senior masters, new participants presented experimental works beside traditional and academic styles, enriching the exhibition with diverse expressions.

An eye-catching oil painting by Bijon Chowdhury reminded viewers of the history of humankind. This year, the group paid homage to Bijon Babu. Another major attraction was a black-and-white drawing by Jogen Chowdhury, whose continued participation inspires younger members. His simple linear treatment beautifully captures the elegance of the female face. Viewers were drawn to the modern presentation of Subrata Ghosh, whose allegorical works reflect today’s environmental crisis. His aesthetic approach, though uncommon for average viewers, strongly evokes concern for nature lost to inhumane activities.

Senior artist Sima Barua continued her traditional institutional style through sepia etchings depicting tender family narratives with graceful linear forms. The only tempera painting in the exhibition, by Swapnendu Bhumik, portrayed the darker realities of our time with soft, systematic composition. Susanta Chakraborty, long known for his oil paintings depicting masked and caustic faces, explored the pastel medium here, balancing blue and yellow tones to create atmospheric depth.

Sibaprasad Kar Chowdhuri’s non-figurative landscapes carried his signature layered color fields, creating space and dimension. Goutam Bhumik’s dramatic still lifes featured rich textures and bright hues. Abhijit Das, inspired by slums and garbage landscapes, presented mixed-media works reflecting the concern for nature. Bibek Kalyan Roy’s pencil-based landscapes offered a soothing visual experience through smoky spatial divisions. Among the sculptors, Anup Mondal presented a half-burst aluminium sculpture with a deliberately rough surface, while Raksh Sadhak experimented with mixed materials to interpret human and civil structural forms. Overall, artists of Calcutta Painters—from their foundation to the present—remain deeply connected to nature and environmental consciousness. From this perspective, the title “Climacteric” aptly reflects the theme of transition and critical change in both nature and human society.

Pratima Abhange: Threads of Memory and the Sacred by Dr. Ved Prakash Bhardwaj

Pratima Abhange

Pratima Abhange's artistic practice unfolds as a deeply meaningful dialogue between India's spiritual inheritance and the complexities of contemporary life. Her works do not merely revisit mythological narratives or sacred imagery; instead, they reawaken the timeless presence of these traditions within the modern mind. Indian Puranas, epics, myths, and socio-cultural structures have never truly belonged only to the past. They continue to shape everyday values, human behaviour, ethical thought, and collective emotional life. In this sense, tradition is not a closed chapter—it is a living continuum.

Title: Manthan, Acrylic on canvas, 6X21 feet. 

            Human beings, regardless of time and place, remain psychologically and materially connected to their histories. These connections are preserved through collective memory, which functions as a cultural thread linking generations. It is through these shared memories—embedded in rituals, stories, festivals, visual symbols, songs, and family practices—that the sacred retains its presence in daily life. Drawing nourishment from this vast civilizational reservoir, Pratima Abhange constructs her own distinct artistic language. Her work becomes a space where memory and myth converge, and where the sacred becomes visible through the vocabulary of contemporary art.

            What makes Pratima Abhange's art especially striking is her confident engagement with materiality and surface. Her paintings are not simply images—they are tactile experiences. She skilfully combines acrylic colours with dense textures, layered pigments, and shimmering gold foil highlights, creating compositions that appear radiant and monumental. The presence of gold is especially significant: it does not merely function as ornamentation, but evokes associations of ritual sanctity, temple aesthetics, divine aura, and spiritual illumination. Through this combination of rich textures and luminous surfaces, her works gain depth, dramatic intensity, and a distinctive visual authority. In several compositions she also applies mural techniques in parts of the painting, reinforcing the sense of sacred wall imagery and echoing India's long tradition of temple murals and devotional pictorial storytelling.

            The narratives of her artworks are rooted in Indian spiritual and mythological traditions, yet her mode of representation aligns strongly with modern and contemporary artistic sensibilities. This duality—anchored in tradition yet energized by modernity—becomes central to her visual identity. At places, she also incorporates references to folk idioms and regional aesthetics, thereby widening the cultural horizon of her works. These inclusions are not superficial; rather, they signify her understanding that the sacred in India has always been expressed through multiple artistic registers—from classical sculpture to folk painting, from temple murals to puppetry traditions.

            Religion forms the foundation of Indian civilizational life and cannot be disregarded. The history of Indian art reveals a sustained engagement with the sacred and the mythic. From the celebrated mythological paintings of Raja Ravi Varma to the early phase of the Bengal School, and through the living traditions of South Indian devotional art, mythological figures and religious narratives have held a powerful presence. This continuous engagement has ensured that sacred imagery remains embedded in the collective psyche of Indian society, shaping the way people visualize divinity and understand morality, duty, compassion, and devotion.

            However, modern Indian art in the twentieth century gradually distanced itself from religious imagery in its attempt to align with international modernism and new aesthetic concerns. While this movement created important innovations, it also widened the gap between modern art and the common viewer. Pratima Abhange's artistic journey can be seen as an attempt to bridge this gap. She reclaims the mythic and the sacred not as nostalgia but as relevance. By drawing upon familiar divine figures while using contemporary methods of texture, abstraction, simplification, and spatial design, she reconnects art with people's emotional world and cultural consciousness. In doing so, she re-establishes art as a shared experience rather than an isolated intellectual practice.

            Her careful study of the Puranas and other classical texts lends authenticity and conceptual depth to her work. This is important because her paintings are not simply decorative representations of gods and goddesses; they reflect a thoughtful engagement with philosophical ideas, ethical dilemmas, and timeless narratives. The works featured in this exhibition include multiple depictions of Lord Rama, Goddess Sita, Lord Krishna, and Lord Ganesha. These deities are not only central to mythology—they form part of the living spiritual fabric of India. They exist within domestic worship, public festivals, temple spaces, and emotional memory. In Pratima's hands, these divine presences become both symbolic and intimate, monumental and accessible.

            The compositional structure of her works reveals a strong sense of rhythm and visual harmony. Her figures often possess a poised and musical arrangement, guiding the viewer's gaze across the surface with grace. There is a balance between movement and stillness, between narrative suggestion and meditative calm. While depicting divine forms, Pratima Abhange foregrounds not only their mythological significance but also their humanistic and practical meanings. For example, Rama is not only a mythic hero but a moral ideal; Sita becomes a symbol of strength, endurance, and dignity; Krishna represents divine playfulness, love, and cosmic wisdom; and Ganesha embodies auspicious beginnings, intelligence, and removal of obstacles. Thus, the sacred in her works does not remain distant—it becomes ethically and emotionally relatable.

            Her use of colour is equally rich and expressive. Colours in her paintings do not merely fill space—they carry mood, symbolism, and spiritual resonance. Several works feature a flat treatment of the background, which strengthens their connection to contemporary aesthetics. This flatness creates an intentional contrast: the deities and figures emerge with heightened presence, as if they have been cut out and placed against a timeless field. This approach reinforces modern visual sensibilities while preserving the iconic quality of the subject.

            The narratives of the Ramayana and Mahabharata frequently appear in her paintings, but she also explores themes beyond epic storytelling. Ganesha, in particular, emerges as one of her most beloved subjects. Two distinctive stylistic approaches can be observed in her Ganesha works. In one style, she attempts to create a three-dimensional sculptural effect through the build-up of layered colour and thick texture. Here, Ganesha appears almost like a carved or embossed presence, commanding attention through physical depth.

            In the second style, her works draw inspiration from South Indian puppet art and also reflect structural qualities reminiscent of batik. This is a highly significant visual choice, because puppet forms are traditionally connected to storytelling, ritual theatre, and folk narrative performance. Through puppet-like stylization, Pratima transforms the divine figure into a vibrant cultural symbol—one that feels rooted in the community and not confined to temple hierarchy. Texture becomes a major attraction in these works, whether through impasto or layered effects. These layered surfaces create a sense of time, memory, and accumulated experience—almost as if the painting itself carries traces of history.

            In Pratima Abhange's work, subject matter, composition, and creative process are equally important. Her paintings often develop through multiple stages and layers. The main subject is built up through varied textures and layered colour, while the background is frequently kept solid and restrained. This formal strategy allows her to achieve a puppet-like cut-out effect, where figures appear elevated from the ground, commanding visual dominance. This method enhances clarity, strengthens symbolism, and brings an iconic stillness to her compositions.

            An especially notable dimension of her practice is imagination. Mythological and religious subjects carry emotional and devotional sensitivity, leaving limited scope for radical distortion. Yet Pratima carefully negotiates this limitation. Without breaking the sacred bond that viewers hold with divine imagery, she introduces imaginative expansions and interpretative freedom. This is clearly visible in her work Manthan, inspired by the churning of the ocean (Samudra Manthan). In her composition she portrays eight deities, even though the mythological narrative does not specify the identities of the gods involved. Here, her imagination becomes a creative tool to widen the symbolic meaning of the story. The work transcends a literal retelling and enters the realm of philosophical reflection. It evokes the eternal struggle between forces of good and evil, truth and deception, chaos and order—struggles that remain relevant in every era, including the present.

            Alongside her narrative and mythological works, Pratima Abhange also creates landscape paintings that reflect a different emotional tone. These landscapes are often abstract and impressionistic, rather than realistic depictions. In them, lived experience becomes more central than mythic imagination. The bridges, rivers, boats, vehicles, and urban-rural transitions encountered during travel appear as fragments of memory. Morning light, dusk, fog, and twilight become emotional environments rather than literal scenes. Her landscapes therefore function not only as representations of nature, but also as representations of feeling.

            A spiritual dimension emerges in many of these landscapes as well. For instance, in her depiction of Mount Kailash, she introduces an orange band at the base of the canvas—an artistic gesture that transforms the landscape into a sacred realm. The colour orange evokes renunciation, devotion, fire, ritual energy, and divine presence. Through such elements, she suggests that nature itself is sacred. In her abstract landscapes, the density of colour and the intensity of texture evoke a mystical atmosphere. Even without explicit narrative, these works remain deeply connected to the internal world of human emotion, contemplation, and spiritual longing.

            Ultimately, Pratima Abhange's art reveals how memory can become an aesthetic force and how the sacred can remain visually alive in the modern world. Her paintings act as bridges—between myth and modernity, between faith and aesthetics, between inherited tradition and personal imagination. Through texture, colour, gold luminosity, and layered construction, she gives form to a uniquely contemporary devotion—one that honours the past while speaking directly to the present.