Important Notice

"Jogen Chowdhury…is an artist with a singular sensibility. His innate sense of rhythm, his subtle ability to uncover the sensuality at the heart of events, to draw them together and to slip his longings and fears into a variety of things, truly distinguishes his work of the last 40 years. Behind his ability to gather everything in a cadenced embrace lies his genius to reach out and internalize the 'other'" (R. Siva Kumar, Jogen Chowdhury:... "Jogen Chowdhury…is an artist with a singular sensibility. His innate sense of rhythm, his subtle ability to uncover the sensuality at the heart of events, to draw them together and to slip his longings and fears into a variety of things, truly distinguishes his work of the last 40 years. Behind his ability to gather everything in a cadenced embrace lies his genius to reach out and internalize the 'other'" (R. Siva Kumar, Jogen Chowdhury: Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Museum, Fukuoka, 2005, p. 9).

In this 1995 watercolour portrait, we see the passive sensuality and longings that Siva Kumar describes in Chowdhury's rendering of the 'other.' Here, a nude sits in quiet contemplation of a distant crescent moon. Rejecting Romanticism, the artist uses his unique idiom of distortion to help his figures and his viewers transcend the ordinariness and the predictability of their everyday existence, and to offer expression to the emotions and desires they would otherwise conceal. The artist's portrayal also accommodates his consciousness of the unique way in which Indian men and women sit and move - something he terms "the reality of the Indian form" (as quoted in Ibid., p. 91). As the artist's critic and biographer R. Siva Kumar explains, "Disproportion is the essence of Jogen's bodies, the sign of their naturalness…In them disproportion is expression, never deformation." Particularly with the women he portrays, this distortion is only "external", enhancing the "reverence and sympathy" the artist feels for their situation (Ibid., p. 9, 86).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site