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Lot 66

 

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Born in 1939 in undivided India, Jogen Chowdhury is known for his ability to successfully marry traditional imagery with the zeitgeist of contemporary painting, with a skillful blend of an urbane self- awareness and a highly localized Bengali influence. Though widely travelled and conversant in the international language of contemporary art, his imagery is drawn from his cultural background more than his intellectual milieu.
Born in 1939 in undivided India, Jogen Chowdhury is known for his ability to successfully marry traditional imagery with the zeitgeist of contemporary painting, with a skillful blend of an urbane self- awareness and a highly localized Bengali influence. Though widely travelled and conversant in the international language of contemporary art, his imagery is drawn from his cultural background more than his intellectual milieu.

Commenting on the seminal body of work Chowdhury produced in the early 1970s, R. Siva Kumar notes, "…they mark a departure from his early work in several ways. Most significantly, in these works he begins to work in a personal idiom that is closer to doodled drawings. Its relaxed linearism invokes, without suggesting any obvious appropriation, the many living practices of folk and rural arts, especially those by unsung artisans. He uses a deceptively naïve tangle of lines woven into an intricate web to ensnare images floating in the inner depths of his mind… Often the motifs drift effortlessly across dark surfaces" (Jogen Chowdhury, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2002, not paginated).

Siva Kumar also discusses the imagery of lone couples often depicted in Chowdhury's works. "Images of men and women seen in ambiguous encounters - now salacious, now moralizing, now mocking, now celebrating - grow into a slow and languorous theatre of gestures. But this gesture-play is neither provocative nor romantic, and its protagonists are often dissimilar and unequal. His women, never too cultivated or too primitive, are always vivid, pulsatile and naturally erotic. Their male companions are by contract often ashen, lifeless and marginalized. Glimpses of these couples reflect the shifting mind-play of a voyeur vicariously participating in the life of others." (Ibid.)

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