Important Notice

Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting early in his career because of their rigid academism and the bourgeois leanings they implied. Instead, the artist looked to the Indian family and traditional folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often distortedly, recall people from his daily life – from Bengali housewives and their husbands to the... Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting early in his career because of their rigid academism and the bourgeois leanings they implied. Instead, the artist looked to the Indian family and traditional folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often distortedly, recall people from his daily life – from Bengali housewives and their husbands to the politicians and businessmen on the streets of New Delhi. Through Chowdhury’s unique development of form and his detailed communication of posture and interpersonal relationships, these ordinary figures are magnified and endowed with a mythical lyricism that transports them from the mundane to the theatrical.

“Jogen has long been an ironist, training his sardonic eye on the concupiscence and suspicion that underpin human relationships, the scorn and loathing that are so often the obverse of the coin of love. His eye is peculiarly satirical in its ability to strip its subjects down to the primal instincts. Yet it is also sensually connoisseurial, in the manner in which it dwells on such details as a tumescent breast or a crimped stomach. And it is compassionate, also, in its evocation of the intricate tapestry of motives and actions that is human behaviour. Oscillating between sentiment and satire, Jogen’s attitude suggests a dark romanticism, impelled by a tender sympathy with human fallibility” (Ranjit Hoskote, A Calligraphy of Touch and Gaze, Kalakriti Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006, not paginated).

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