Long before galleries and collectors entered his life, artist Chandra Bhattacharjee spent years suspended above Kolkata’s streets, painting hoardings on scaffoldings and terraces. The city—with its daily wage labourers, migrant workers and pavement dwellers—was his studio. That experience still lingers in his art.
The figures in his white-and-grey drawings, presented in A Star Amongst Too Many at Birla Academy of Art & Culture in Kolkata, appear suspended in emptiness. A man curls up beneath a crumpled plastic sheet. Another sits hunched over, his belongings packed into a single thin bag. A woman dissolves into a wash of smoky grey, her face turned away, unreadable. The choice is conscious, an attempt to foreground erasure of those who keep the city running, placing him within a long lineage of artists who captured the common man such as MF Husain, Jogen Chowdhury, and Bhupen Khakhar. “I always try to get out of the rut and keep changing my stand as an artist,” he says. “Bengali artists of my generation found it difficult to break out of the Bikash Bhattacharjee-Ganesh Pyne mould. They look down on those who want to break free, accusing them of compromising their art.”
The closeness that Bhattacharjee shares with his subjects gives the works their emotional charge. “We ate the same street food and bathed at the same hydrants,” he says. These are not sentimental portraits of poverty. Nor are they straightforward figurative studies. Many figures turn their backs to the viewer; their anonymity becomes the point.
Bhattacharjee’s greys are never flat. They swell and recede like monsoon clouds or concrete dust. Soft white voids interrupt the darkness like brief moments of hope. Rust-coloured marks stain the surfaces, suggestive of neglect, corrosion and urban exhaustion.
As a child, Bhattacharjee was captivated by artisans painting Hindu effigies. He copied images obsessively and contributed drawings to his school wall magazine. Later, photographer Kanai Karmakar mentored him, teaching him to reconstruct damaged portraits from fragments. That instinct—building images from absences and traces—continues to echo through his work. A 12-year stint at a leading newspaper widened his understanding of international art and visual culture. But when he entered the commercial art market in 2004 with figurative paintings that sold well, dissatisfaction crept in. Today, his practice moves fluidly between drawing, photography and ecological observation. “At this point in my life, I am not bothered about rejection.” That refusal to conform is visible in his drawings.They force viewers to confront lives pushed to the edge of vision—and the uneasy fact that the city has always looked away.
When & Where:
A Star Amongst Too Many; Till May 24; Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata