Silt of Sentiment: Works by contemporary female Indian artists

(SANEPR.com) June 2, 2009 -- 'Silt of Sentiment', conjures up an image of a world that exists literally below the surface - its mysteries, its intimations of secrets and lies, the romances and embedded violence hidden under the layers of what might be normal. This exhibition features an eclectic trio of female artists whose work shows passion for color, texture, and blend while portraying psychological drama and inverted emotions illustrating the human form's transient palpability.

MAHJABIN MAJUMDAR
Majumdar’s human forms laid out as landscapes are rather mystical. Interwoven and embedded within these landscapes are imageries evoking the artist’s constant quest for identity, battling feelings of remorse, fear and residual memories of loss. Wandering along the woods within the human frame, one discovers lyrical mosaics creating poetry of imageries within the paintings. The poetry is of the self, the artist’s quest of relating herself to her surroundings. It is not the mere representation that one sees in this group of paintings, but the portrayal of the human body by implication rather than imitation. Artists attempt to mirror the predicaments of our times through their works of art – it is a personal journey and yet universal portraying, the zeitgeist that knows no geographical boundaries in the present day techno savvy era.

SUMANA CHOWDHURY
Sumana Chowdhury works mostly in the abstract mode, her paintings often bringing to mind the floating imagery in a landscape of memory. She brings a blend of bright color in the form of acrylics, oils and mixed media. Her process involves contemplation and deliberation on the forms and embodiments of interior spaces, objects, and landscapes. She creates surfaces to which viewers are drawn to gaze and meditate. Silent, still, calming canvases that often use split frame to bring into focus one singular idea or object. Her creative journey is a search for resonance in light, color, lines and textures. Appearing much like tapestry woven with drips of color, her paintings have no distinct beginnings or ends. The main stream of thought behind her images, simply stated, is about embracing nature. She works laboriously in layers first in digital media and then on canvas, at times mixing various colors, as the process of layering and mixing simultaneously parallels her own vulnerability, and reflects the kind of continual self-reinvention that every person experiences through their life time.

KAJAL SHAH
Kajal Shah continues to surprise us with the uniqueness of approach to painting - which is both abundantly fresh and alive. Shah employs the motif of ‘house’ to symbolize a home. This latest body of work continues to address Shah’s prior existing interest in depicting contemporary urban landscapes and aberrant domestic structures. She documents the world around her, imagined and factual, with a sort of magical realism. Shah’s works reveal both the magic and transitory nature of all objects—objects that have almost become invisible because of their very familiarity. She invests her paintings with dreamful desires as observed in the works depicting monumental and bedecked fountain much like the Christmas tree. Sometimes it metamorphoses into a playful paradigmatic animation as the chef’s hat or emanates from the formation of an overgrown moss, or suspends from dark rain-laden cloud, dangles as fruit or trophies from a leafless, barren tree, becomes a baggage for an immigrant or revolves like a satellite around rotating top. Her painterly configuration conjures limitless space emphatically embedding her pictorial elements amidst the starkness of vacuum, void and infinity. Shah tirelessly engages herself on a quest for new forms of expression, explorations in various mediums and materials while probing the idea of hidden identity and hidden reality. Her meticulously detailed canvases explore space, both physical and psychological, producing razor–sharp insights.