Important Notice

Jogen Chowdhury's oeuvre addresses the human form in its myriad roles. He reveals the body in diverse situations - alone, scarred, aged and mutilated, dressed in fineries, couples enacting various interactions- some intimate while others distanced and even hostile. In Chowdhury's works, the body not only tells its own tale but also acts as an enabler of the episode being enacted in the painting. It is both the alphabet and the story.
Jogen Chowdhury's oeuvre addresses the human form in its myriad roles. He reveals the body in diverse situations - alone, scarred, aged and mutilated, dressed in fineries, couples enacting various interactions- some intimate while others distanced and even hostile. In Chowdhury's works, the body not only tells its own tale but also acts as an enabler of the episode being enacted in the painting. It is both the alphabet and the story.

"Jogen does not stress the specificities of place and therefore, of time or history in his work while recreating experiences. It is a theatre without props, only bodies. Yet his viewers, especially his Indian viewers, will readily recognize that his men and women belong to the middle class, to the Bengali middle class even, and that they are - as their gestures and dishabille suggest - caught in their unguarded domestic situations. The viewers will also notice that men do not measure up to the women in his paintings. The men are often older and frailer. But essentially it is not age or well-being that separates them, it is substance. The women are sensual, have more presence, more virility without being exactly man-eaters or femme fatales. The men manifest fate, women express character. One is hemmed by circumstance; the other is powered by will. Addressing each other and yet sealed within themselves, they keep life's theatre going." (R.Siva Kumar, Jogen Chowdhury- Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Musem, Glenbarra, 2005, pgs. 10-11).

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