STRUCTURE | Recent Works of SOMENATH MAITY by Gallery Sanskriti

SOMENATH MAITY

STRUCTURE Recent works of

SOMENATH MAITY September 8th - October 6th, 2016 1 - 8 pm daily except sundays & holidays

5C, Alipore Park Road, Kolkata - 700027 Ph. +91 33 2448 4925 / 2449 7931 | www.gallerysanskriti.com | info@gallerysanskriti.com

POETRY OF THE CITY - Mangalesh Dabral

This city will always pursue you. You will walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, will turn gray in these same houses. You will always end up in this city. -Constantine P. Cavafy Cities are like lovers. They welcome you, touch and caress you with the hands of their luminous streets and dark mysterious alleys, and their lamp posts seem like the signifiers of some unknown civilization. You could laugh, weep and dream with them and they will listen to you and never let you alone. They seem in perpetual waiting for those who are in love with them. The allurement of the city is such that if you enter it once, notwithstanding the complexities and hardships you come across, you will never go back, never leave it because, as the great Greek poet Cavafy says, the ‘city will always pursue you’. Most of the people who, some decades ago, came to the cities from rural areas, villages and small towns must have experienced the awe of entering those sprawling spaces , wondering as to how one could live there and eventually staying there forever. Slowly, the city grows upon you and you fall in love with it. Somenath Maity is a painter in love with Kolkata, where he came as a country boy from his lush green village Darua in East Midnapore district in West Bengal (now Pashim Banga) and observed the city life while travelling in the double decker buses. Even though he faced a number of difficulties in meeting the ends meet, he kept pursuing art studies at an art institute run by the eminent artist Shuvaprasanna. During his formative years, cityscapes of Kolkata, its historic architecture, ruins and living houses, its streets, squares and pavements, lights at night, traffic signals, and the solitude of neighbourhoods had a lasting effect on his sensibility and these concrete images formed the understructure for the ensuing abstractions on his canvases. Despite being a keen observer of Kolkata’s daily life shimmering with the toiling masses, there is minimum human presence in his canvases, but what is remarkable is that he creates a poetic vision by depicting things used by the common and downtrodden people. Thus we see handcarts without their pullers, resting in a corner, charpoys, and the utensils of kitchen, a handpump, forlorn staircases, abandoned ladders, thatches and doors of the makeshift dwelling places for the poor, and the railings separating them from rest of the city. Such images mark one of the early phases of Somenath’s work. His canvases of that period represent, on the level of content, a deep concern for the backyards and the margins of the city where the poor, toiling people live in misery and, on the level of form, a jigsaw puzzle -like quality that requires a close look at each and every detail in order to understand the artist’s statement. With a strong drawing base, such canvases are unique in their starkness and almost monochromatic quality. Invisibility of human beings in Somenath’s canvases is also a profound statement on the city life where imposing structures take the centre-stage and people often become secondary, marginalized and negligible.

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Relationship between the ‘concrete’ or ‘realistic’ and the ‘abstract’ has often been a matter of debate in the world of art. Many artists hold that an abstract painting should not be viewed as something corresponding with some reality. It’s somewhat like the unending arguments about the content and the form in the field of literature. American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock was of the view that ‘abstract art should be enjoyed jus as music is enjoyed.’ True, abstract art is not an imitation of reality or a parallel depiction of it, but it does have a relation with the reality which is often complex and dialectical in its nature. In the abstract art, realism gets transformed into what can be called a ‘higher or heightened realism’. For the Italian sculptor Constantine Brancusi, abstract was the most realistic because ‘what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.’

Somenath’s canvases are superb examples of the dialectics of reality and abstraction, of the ‘heightened realism’ as they do not just provide the exteriors, but depict the essence, the soul of the city, and may be, for this very reason Somenath does not portray the obvious landmarks of Kolkata such as the Victoria Memorial, Chowringhee or Howrah Bridge, a difficult choice for an artist so immersed in his city. Somenath’s Kolkata is much more interiorized, it’s a Kolkata that transcends its physical appearances, a city within the city where geometrical shapes, angles and triangles, domes, turrets and minarets of a building, temple, church or mosque, balconies, doors and railings of old and new houses cast semblances upon each other and form another place.

Watched mostly at the twilight or night, when the dust of the day settles on the pavements, shadows and silences start growing, and, in the words of American poet Langston Hughes, ‘the city goes to bed, hanging lights above its head’, Somenath’s cityscapes overwhelm and invite the viewer to be wrapped up in its solitude:

City of emptiness, city of the white façades, city where one lonely dangling lantern Wavers aloft like a taper before a marble sarcophagus, frightening away the ghosts; City where a single white-lit window in a motionless blackened house-front swallows The hosts of darkness that stream down the street towards it; City above whose dark tree-tangled park emerges suddenly, unlit, uncannily, a grey Ghostly tower whose base is lost in the fog, and whose summit has no end. City of midnight, Bury me in your silence. City of night, Wrap me in your folds of shadow.

(Excerpt from John Gould Fletchner’s poem)

Somenath’s later works mark an interesting journey from forms to colours, from concrete to semi-abstract to pure abstract where shapes start merging with colours. It is remarkable that in his new canvases, Somenath avoids painting what he has observed, but paints what he feels about what he has observed. There are of course visuals of the city that are quite layered and imposing, but they belong more to a ‘felt’ space rather than a ‘seen ‘one. Even though having a sound drawing base--which is one of the important traits in his works-- they speak mostly in the language of rich and vibrant colours, their sharp angular shapes, triangles, quadrangles and arches become softer and smoother and the blacks and the grays of earlier canvases turn into reds, yellows, greens and blues in their all hues and layers. In these canvases Somenath emerges as a master colourist. Somenath’s cityscapes are beautiful, illuminated, and enchanting. They are solitary and dream-like too. They provide a visual treat, but what is more striking is that they seem to unfold some mystery to you and you wish to remain in front of them for as long as you can. This has been possible mainly due to Somenath’s masterly use of light in his colours. He has succeeded in producing the inherent light of each and every colour he has used. The great French painter Paul Cezanne has said that ‘light is something that cannot be produced, but must be represented by something else—by colour.’ Somenth’s colours represent fascinating variations, layers and hazes of light and create a pervasive veil of atmosphere. In a number of his canvases we see a vast and stylized sky with various hues, clusters of stars and an occasional half moon, and all these images form a grand dream of atmosphere. The lights of the city at night were one of the first images Somenath came across as a boy from village. It’s no wonder that they remained with him and became a part of his consciousness and creations. Since then, he has been listening and talking to the city, walking round it, dreaming and lamenting with it and finding a world with every footstep. He dreams the city in lines, colours and lights, and creates poetry in his canvases.

Mangalesh Dabral is a well-known poet and journalist. A Sahitya Akademi Award winning litterateur, he writes on art, music and cultural issues.

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STRUCTURED CITY VISION

Globally, at the moment, visual art is split between two major categories. Senior artists, as well as many young ones, are still creating works in the genres which get across to the viewers exclusively through the language they speak. Sometimes titles provide the viewer with some uncertain clues to the meaning but no pointers exist for those that are “untitled”. A title often identifies the image, painted or sculpted, especially if it’s a portrait but in most cases its function is merely referential. Impacts of the works in these genres are instant and, in the main, visual. In the other category artworks are often assemblages of objects to be visually scrutinised to look for ideas and concepts diversely structured mainly to evoke an intellectual response of the viewer. In the new exhibit constructs the visuals play no less important a part and they may include, along with juxtaposed real world objects, paintings, photographs, other created works of traditional genres and even sometimes a live performance or video and audio projections. But the viewer in most cases has to be equipped with a printed statement by the artist explaining his/her concepts or giving a résuméé of the themes the works are supposed to embody. In India, a new generation of artists since the nineties have been producing these objects of what is branded as Contemporary Art. They are primarily led by artists based in Delhi, Mumbai and Baroda. Bengal is no exception either. Many young and not-so-young Installationists have already displayed their talent in this avant-garde mode. But the practice of Contemporary Art in Bengal hasn’t yet gathered enough momentum as a widespread movement to lend to Bengal Art a new direction in avant-gardism. Hence in the history of post-independence Bengal art, the benchmark still remains the achievements of the artists of the sixties and the seventies. This quick briefing on the current state of art has no direct bearing on my subject in this essay—an appreciative study of the art of Somenath Maity. But writing at the close of the year 2015, an author has to give his reader a clear perspective of his own stand vis-à-vis the things that are happening around the world of art. For, Somenath grew up through those decades of the last century when the local and national art scenes were dominated by the stalwarts of avant-garde modernism. The artists of the sixties and seventies in Bengal excelled in giving the much-used figurative idiom charged look and fresh expressive energy, whereas many of the leading artists elsewhere in India were vigorously exploring diverse facets of abstraction. The young and upcoming artists of Somenath’s generation (of the eighties and after), like their elders, looked upon the world heritage of art as their own and hence absorbed aesthetic values from sources local, national and beyond. But their elders, growing up through the late forties and the fifties, had to face a certain social reality in post Independence Bengal and especially in Calcutta, a reality imprinted by the burden of the immediate impact of communal riots and the heavy influx of refugees in the wake of the Partition. These experiences had somehow convinced many of the artists of the fifties onward that art’s bonding with social reality, however oblique and tenuous, was a must. One of the eight sons of an indigent court clerk father, Somenath was born in 1960 in a remote coastal village of Midnapore district. Even as a boy he showed his talent for drawing and painting, encouraged by the village patuas or idol-makers who often gave him a pot of paint and a lump of clay to keep him engaged in his playful creativity.

He attended a local school, though he was not much good at studies, English being a major stumbling block. The results of his school leaving examination sealed his fate, for further progress in general education was not possible. An acquaintance advised him to try for a career in art and join, for the purpose, the College of Visual Arts run by the reputed artist Shuvaprasanna. At the admission test he topped the list of successful candidates. Somenath spent a total of six years for his art education. From 1979 to 1983 he studied at the College of Visual Arts and simultaneously did a fiveyear Diploma Course in Fine Arts at the Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship (1980-1985). He spared no pains to acquire every skill and technique that needed to be learnt to draw and paint with professional competence. For him, it meant undergoing a lonely, strenuous, city-life far away from home on a pittance of Rs. 200, sent every month by his father, who could ill afford it. He managed his time and finances with excellent finesse, despite a daily practice of drawing and painting, going out for outdoor sketches in and around the city and occasionally to places outside Bengal. The constraints of living space in a big city added another burden, for he had to do many odd jobs in exchange for free lodging or to earn a few extra bucks. From the third year, however, he began to sell his paintings and when he was in the fourth year one of his paintings was included among the exhibits of the National Annual of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, undoubtedly a rare honour for an art student still in his twenties. As if to prove that this honour came by no fluke, his paintings were subsequently selected for its Annuals by the LKA every year of the following decade. With 29 solo shows held in the thirty years since 1986 in all the major cities of India, as well as

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one in New York and another in Stuttgart, besides participation in several prestigious group shows in India and abroad, Somenath has come to be reckoned as an important artist of the eighties generation, gradually growing in stature on the all India art scene. Included among many awards and honours he has won are AIFACS award and scholarship of 2002; Senior Fellowship of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India for 2002-03; Birla Academy of Art and Culture Award of 2002 and a research grant from the Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi for 1993-94. He has received besides, fairly wide acclaim in the press, and, what is even more important, admiring critical assessments by two renowned art writers of Kolkata of the eighties, the late Asoke Mitra and Arany Banerji. OIL ON CANVAS | 18 X 18 INCHES

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Somenath started showing when he was a member of the old Arts’ Acre, which under Shuvaprasanna’s guidance became a celebrated artists’ village formally inaugurated by the famed German author Günter Grass. The village was a mini Santiniketan situated amidst greeneries and open spaces, to the east off the stretch of VIP Road leading to the airport at Dum Dum. Resident in the idyllic village were a group of young artists—painters, sculptors, print- makers— most of whom graduated from the College of Visual Arts. Here, each member lived independently but also as part of an artists’ community with the advantage of sharing, and contributing to. A lively ambience of creative stimulation. Discussions of artrelated issues, exchange of ideas, occasional group activities such as workshops, seminars etc. and coping with problems, both technical and creative, with the practical and pedagogic suggestions of Shuvaprasanna benefited the young aspiring artists quite a lot.

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Many of the leading artists of Somenath’s generation—of the eighties and after— followed the tracks of one or the other of the sixties celebrated seniors. And those who refused to tread their beaten paths of the figurative idiom, took to abstraction while others modelled their mode and manner on those of the Baroda artists, looked upon as the leaders of the Indian avant-garde. Somenath made a modest beginning, employing resources handed down to him by his elders. But he brought to bear upon them his well-honed skills in drawing, creating a pictorial space—in his early works—on paper, filled with short, separate, varied and bold lineal strokes and occasional smudges and dashes. For his art Somenath, however, did not look for stimuli in the immediate environs of the village. The impressions he carried of his encounter with a big metro, such as Kolkata, which impacted on him with striking force when he arrived there from a small quiet village in an outlying district, have always provided him with ideas and motifs for his canvases… “Calcutta, a city with numerous lanes, by-lanes, nooks and corners; buildings of different architectural styles and centuries, jostling together in a vibrant environment of street-hawkers, roadside stalls and processions, giving it the feel of an organic whole. It is this vibrancy that Maity responds to,” writes very perceptively Suneet Chopra, the distinguished Delhi-based art critic in an article of 2000. In the early eighties Kolkata’s Birla Academy mounted a group show to highlight the upcoming young artists of the decade. It displayed two large drawings of Somenath that established beyond doubt the artist was one of the most promising faces of the generation of young painters. Charged with powerful execution, the drawings riveted the audience for their formal energy despite representational content. The drawings showed compositions in vertical format evoking aerial views of a poor urban locality with dingy slum tenements clustering on both sides a narrow winding lane that runs across the pictorial space from the bottom to the top. The images were basically spectacular structural build-up of spaces with details meticulously done in terms of indigent environs of life. The charcoal strokes bristled across each frame with very large spaces powerfully handled to pull off most satisfactory pictorial effects of both defining precision and expressive acuity. Somenath’s first solo was probably mounted in 1986 at the Academy of Fine Arts gallery in Kolkata. It consisted of drawings mostly in large formats of life-scapes in slums. Kolkata, like all metros, has extensive ever-expanding slums as an inalienable part of India’s urban reality. Pen-and-ink evocations of congested localities with tile-roofed dingy dwellings were projected in each frame portraying life scenes of an impecunious underclass population. The show was generally titled Structures, referring to both formal and thematic content of the images. Subsequently the artist has used the same title, enriched with layered meanings, for all his works in varying mediums on paper or canvas. Here the title focussed on the barest framework of existential realities in bristly material expression. Each picture acquired a charged expressiveness because of the rough edges of the structural forms and sharp angularity of various motifs defined with a profusion of brisk and brief hatchings and varied lineal textures. Imaginative interweaving of blank and drawn spaces spelt an effect of richly complex formal abstraction even though the frames evoked lavish visual details of the shoddy facades of shanty towns with shop fronts of cheap eateries, roadside tea stalls and stores stocked with varied paltry wares, pavements littered with rags and rubbish, beggars ‘belongings, junk objects

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dumped against peeling walls. Somenath drew such representational motif with keen zest and care to charge every detail with dense vividness rather than mere realistic accuracy. As a result, the visual details exuded such an intense feel of human existence that shacks and shanties looked bustling with life, even though not a single face or figure appeared anywhere. In his large pen-and-inks packed with powerfully evoked details of slum-life reality there was often no specific focal point to engage the viewer’s eye primarily for meaningful negotiation gradually with the rest of the image. His early use of colour, in stains and smudges, often of monochrome shades of blue, was not meant for any superadded painterly function. Strategically located colour strokes and patches, besides toning up black-and-white pictorial details, provided the viewer with a few viewing points in large format drawings which sported animated execution in every part. Somenath began to turn out regular paintings from the mid-nineties, employing both oil and acrylic with a growing command over the handling of either. In an article in 2000 on his works since 1985, I wrote“… his canvases started edging towards abstraction. His Structures already had both figurative and formal implication, so switching over to abstract and semi-abstract imagery was actually no major shift for him. In some series, comprising such as those he exhibited in Birla Academy show [titled], ‘Abstract Trends’ of 1997, there were bold configurations of structures in lineal brushstrokes but he diluted the representational content. A limited palette and a strictly formal arrangement of structural motifs were the basic components of the images. One could however occasionally spot in them residual representational contours barely evoked amidst Braque-like Cubist construction of spaces.” Somenath soils in recent years, done with a richly varied palette, thrive at the interface between abstraction and representation. The artist delights in employing colours to create structural shapes either with an unobtrusive accent on the purity of forms, often near-geometric in definition, or on their role as constituent parts of representational arrangements evoking urban scenes. Many of his canvasses may primarily strike one as paintings of vibrant chromatic structure and as such can be enjoyed as tidy works of visionary abstraction. But gradually there emerges in each a cluster of diverse colourful structures with neatly etched contours of a flourishing city-scape, rarely with drab dwellings of the poor. Colours bright and varied, soft or radiant, in powerful and imaginative schemes, play a dominant role now in the formation of meaning in these pictures. A brilliant colourist, the artist knows how to fill each passage of paint with charged expressiveness. His palette has a wide range of shades, each interacting with the other in ebullient tonal variations to create sumptuous, resonant harmonies that constitute the main burden of meaning in each canvas. In some frames the basic colour is solemn, suggesting a nocturnal mood of general darkness against which structures are vividly etched in flat or densely grained passages of paint either as illuminated forms or as dark back-lit silhouettes, fretted with luminous textures of lines, dashes, dots or skeins of streaky strokes. The vitality of brush-marks and a symphony of bristly textures in infinite variety animate each picture and enrich each part of the canvas with vivid visual splendour.

The same splendour suffuses also the compositions with no night sky backdrop. The structures of diverse architectural styles, tall towers, multi-storied buildings, tenements and dwellings with flat or sloped roofs, churches with spires or steeples and mosques with domes, turrets and minarets and pointed arches, stand cheek by jowl in the foreground. Their facets and façades, shaped out often as Cubist planes, irregularly or sharply angular, squarish or spherical— vividly defined in cobalt blues, orangey reds, tender ochres, rusty browns, creamy yellows—glow and gleam in daylight with or without strong cast shades or shadows. In some instances, colour schemes comprising darks and lights, strategically juxtaposed, enliven the canvases with a dramatic chiaroscuro. In the background of such houseclusters spaces are evoked often with fluid cloud-like passages of finely graded soft-hued paint—shades of mauve, gray or brownish orange—touched up with an unexpected brushy dash of glowing yellow. In some frames a hillscape or mountain range backdrops the colourful township, in others flotsams of bright yellow or orange fill the densely painted background space along with a couple of nebulous passages of paint, to round off the township motifs with a sophisticated ambience of pure abstraction. Somenath chooses to paint structures and nothing else in canvas after canvas but brings to bear upon each an element of visionary freshness. This is partly because of his finessed handling of paint and palette and partly due to his innovative and spontaneous formal treatment. As a result, his structuring of composition ceases to be mere composition with structures and rises to an aesthetic height.

– Manasij Majumder Kolkata

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SOMENATH MAITY Born in 1960 at Darua, in West Bengal, Somenath Maity is an Indian painter known for his oil paintings of urban landscapes. EDUCATION 1980-85 Five years Diploma Course in Fine Arts from Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Calcutta. 1979-85 studied Fine Arts at Visual Arts under guidance of Shuvaprasanna, Calcutta.

2002 Triven Kala Sangam, New Delhi 2000-01 Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore 1999 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 1998 Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta 1997 Rabindra Bhavan, Lalit Kala Akademi New Delhi 1991-94 Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta 1991 Bajaj Art Gallery, Mumbai 1989 Tagore Art Gallery, Airport, Calcutta 1986 Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta

HONOURS 2002-03 Senior Fellowship, Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India 2002 AIFACS Award, New Delhi 2002 Birla Academy Award, Calcutta 1995 AIFACS Scholarship, New Delhi 1993-94 Research Grant from Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi 1992 All India Youth Art Camp organised by IAAI 1986 Cultural Dept. of West Bengal 1984-85 BP Poddar Memorial Scholarship, College of Visual Arts, Kolkata 2012 Jury of All India Camel Colour Art Contest MAJOR SOLO SHOWS 2016 Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi 2015 Mahua Gallery, Bangalore 2014 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 2013 Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai 2013 Prakrit Art Gallery, Chennai 2013 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 2011 Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi 2011 Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai 2010 Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai 2009 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 2008 Sanskriti Art Gallery, Calcutta 2007 Art Space Calcutta 2006 Mahua Art Gallery, Bangalore 2006 Art Folio Gallery, Chandigarh 2005 Time and Space, Bangalore 2005 Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai 2004 Gallery One, Gurgaon

2003 2002

Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta

SHOWS HELD OVERSEAS 2007 2007 2007 2007 2006 2006 2002 1991 1991 1983 1983

One Man Show & Artist in Residency at Manhattan & Warwick, New York Group Show at London organised by Mahua Art Gallery Imprints â&#x20AC;&#x201C; India art Show at Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan Royal Academy, London organised by Art Alive Group Show at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore Group Show at London, Henley Festival, U.K. Group Show and Artist in Residency at Barn Gallery, Henley, UK. Group Show at Greenwich Citizen Art Gallery, U.K. Group Show at Ipswich Art Gallery, U.K. One Man Show at Stuttgart, West Germany Group Show at Stockholm, Sweden

SELECTED GROUP PARTICIPATIONS National Exhibition of Lalit Kala Akademi from ’84-’94, II Bharat Biennial, Bhopal, Bombay Art Society, AIFACS, Birla Academy of Art & Culture Annual Exhibition (Calcutta 300 years), Calcutta through the eyes of painters, Young faces of Indian Cotemporary of Art, organised by Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta, “Ganapati” Terracotta Exhibition at Chemould Art Gallery, Calcutta, “The New Generation” at Calcutta, Delhi and Mumbai, Gitanjali to Pather Panchali with M. F. Husain at Tata Centre, Calcutta, Calcutta Metropolitan Festival of Art, Miniature painting show at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi, Abstract Trends, Birla Academy, Calcutta, Viswabanga Sammelan, Calcutta ’01, East zone Regional Exhibition at CIMA, Calcutta ’02, Annual Exhibition Birla Academy, Calcutta, AIFACS ’02, Art of Bengal at the VAG, IHC New Delhi, Metropolitan Festival, Calcutta, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai organised by Concern India Foundation, Art for Heart’s Sake organised by ‘Save’ India, Art for a cause at Chitrakala Parisad, Bangalore, ‘Art Access ‘03’ organised by Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Mumbai, Annual Show: Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta, Gallery Sanskriti , Calcutta, Annual Show ‘06 by Gallery Sanskriti, ‘Harvest’ –Anniversary Show of Arushi Art Gallery ’09. ‘Evolve’ - 10th Anniversary Show of Tao Art Gallery ’10. WORKSHOPS Gangotsav at Diamond Harbor, Dresden (Germany) - Calcutta Artist workshop at Arts Acre organised by Max Mueller Bhavan, Terracotta workshop at Arts Acre organised by Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, Woodcut print workshop conducted by Richard Hards - U.S.I.S. & Arts Acre, Graphics workshop conducted by Paula Sengupta, Prima-Alliance Francaise & Arts Acre, Painting workshop at Gadiara organised by West Bengal Govt. Tourism, Terracotta workshop at Barn Gallery, U.K. Viswa Banga Sammelan, Calcutta ’01, ITC Painting workshop at Rajputana Palace, Jaipur & Hotel Marriot, New Delhi, Maihar Art Camp at Maiher, M.P. organised by Gallery Sanskriti, Workshop at Vedic Village, Workshop 2000-01 Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath,

Bangalore. 1999 1998 1997

Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta Rabindra Bhavan, Lalit Kala Akademi New Delhi

1991-94 Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta 1991 Bajaj Art Gallery, Mumbai 1989 Tagore Art Gallery, Airport, Calcutta 1986 Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta SHOWS HELD OVERSEAS 2007 2007 2007 2007 2006 2006 2002 1991 1991 1983 1983

One Man Show & Artist in Residency at Manhattan & Warwick, New York Group Show at London organised by Mahua Art Gallery Imprints – India art Show at Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan Royal Academy, London organised by Art Alive Group Show at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore Group Show at London, Henley Festival, U.K. Group Show and Artist in Residency at Barn Gallery, Henley, UK Group Show at Greenwich Citizen Art Gallery, UK Group Show at Ipswich Art Gallery, UK One Man Show at Stuttgart, West Germany Group Show at Stockholm, Sweden.