Jogen Chowdhury (b. 1939)

Minor abrasion to paper surface lower left corner visible in catalogue illustration; otherwise work appears to be in good overall condition. Background blacks deeper in original than catalogue illustration.
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'Chowdhury's seemingly out of control outlines that enclose mottled areas of moldering flesh etched in a spidery networks of cross-hatched lines and his bodies that bloat and sag as if some genetic code within them has gone mad, are not images that are easy to forget.'

In 1965 Jogen Chowdhury went to Paris on a French Government scholarship.  He lived in France for two years where he spent most of his time visiting museums and art galleries and on his return to India he became concerned that as an artist there was 'nothing left to do'.  What I felt quite strongly about was the need to create something new and original something which could not be accomplished either by replication of Western Art or by falling back on Indian art, in other words, on ancient  India and its heritage alone... The other idea that struck me was that it was my own characteristics that would define and determine my art and its conventions.  My memories, my dreams, my thoughts, my environment – they could all become subjects of my works.' (Jogen Chowdhury, Enigmatic Visions, Glennbarra Museum Japan, 2005, p. 28).

Rejecting his stylistic predecessors from the Bengal school, and avoiding the tendency to draw too much from Western traditions Jogen Chowdhury looked to the more folkloric aspects of Indian culture for inspiration and to his own observations of Indian society.  His works characterized by elongated, amoebic figures and preference for highly decorative surfaces, Chowdhury's art draws equally from the natural and the psychological. Explaining his unusual depiction of the human body, Chowdhury explains, "I had the idea that if I were portraying an Indian man I should be conscious of the fact that we Indians sit in a manner quite different from that of a European. Our bodily forms, movements and looks are very different, I sought to study this difference and bring it to my painting. This was a new point of interest for me as a revelation of the reality of the Indian form." (Jogen Chowdhury, Jogen Chowdhury: Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan, 2005, pp. 90-91).

Chowdhury's figures appear through a thick black backdrop that do not allow for identifying features of time or place, in stylized forms that are uniquely his own, their bodies sagging and mutating like the vegetal tendrils that he also paints. 'Fruits, heads, hands and breasts, everything carries the imprint of autumnal maturity, even a sense of ripeness turning into an intimation of decay and transience...  Jogen's figures sometimes slump like an exhausted animal or splay out like a squashed frog while they remain fully alive...it gives these figures a comical edge, a certain humor and if only occasionally, also the teeth of biting satire.' (ibid)