SUCH A LONG JOURNEY

A major retrospective of artist Jogen Chowdhury's work showcases art from 1955 to 2023

- Aditya Mani Jha

The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), one of the great innovators of 20th-century abstract art, kept refining his style up until his last active years. Decade by decade, you can see the evolution from his early, figurative paintings to increasingly rarefied levels of abstraction until we reach 1940s works like ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’, Mondrian’s breathtaking, vertiginous response to New York’s skyline. A new retrospective, Into the Half Light & Shadow Go I, offers a similar journey covering the stylistic evolution of 84-year-old Jogen Chowdhury, one of India’s pre-eminent artists. The show has been curated by Jesal Thacker and Soumik Nandy Majumdar and presented by Kolkata’s Gallery Art Exposure.

Like Mondrian, Chowdhury moved gradually towards a higher degree of abstraction after being exposed to the methods of Picasso. But his work—dominated by cross-hatched sketches in pencil and charcoal, and later, sculpture-like supine human figures in watercolour and ink—is informed by a diverse set of influences, not to mention the shifting socio-political realities around him. During an interview, Chowdhury recalled his early years, marked by displacement and resettlement. He was born in Faridpur in 1939 and the family moved to Calcutta upon Partition.