Vijay Kowshik

Gifted by the artist

The son of artists Pushpa and Dinkar Kowshik, Vijay Kowshik is a contemporary Indian artist who continues the family’s creative and academic legacy. Primarily interested in three-dimensional mediums, Kowshik began his career in ceramics, but now is a pioneer of glass art in India. Using a variety of techniques such as slumping, fusion, blowing, casting, ariel, graal and staining, Kowshik has created masterworks of stained windows, masks, torsos, a Mahabharata series and interactive sculptures. His glass bust of the former prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was installed at the Parliament Library, Delhi during the time of Somnath Chatterjee’s tenure as the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.

Among Kowshik’s mentors were Bhabesh Chandra Sanyal, Somnath Hore, Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni, Biren De, Jaya Appassamy, Ramkinkar Baij and Sarbari Roy Choudhary, many of them major contributors to modern Indian art and its education centers. Kowshik, like his teachers, is committed to the art education of the next generation, serving as the Director of the XXII and IX Triennale India at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, co-organizing an artist camp in the Himalayan region of Chamba in 2019-20 and offering classes on stained glass, mosaic and firing. Beyond visual art, Kowshik also has a background in architecture, physics, management and design.

The present lot represents the spirit of experimentation in Kowshik’s work. Cast in bronze, these sculptures are richly textural and energetically in motion, a dynamic amalgam of shape that combines abstract and representational qualities. Kowshik imbued an otherwise static material with exciting properties of rhythm and kinesis, demonstrating his insight into the three-dimensional form.