Crows,Cats,Calcutta

Dressed in a simple kurta,artist Shuvaprasanna greets people with a smile,his hands folded in a namaskar.

Dressed in a simple kurta,artist Shuvaprasanna greets people with a smile,his hands folded in a namaskar. Perhaps it is this sense of humility that has led him to hold back on having a retrospective of his works till now. At 65,Shuvaprasanna is finally presenting a variety of works from the early 1960s to the present,at Lalit Kala Akademi,under the promotion of Gallerie Nvya and Art Indus. The show will travel to Mumbai,Kolkata,Bangalore and Chennai.

While his manner may be reticent,Shuvaprasannas early work is feral and potent. Many of the large canvases on display are dark portraits of Kolkata,the city he loves and hates. It was a dark time with the Naxalite movement and Bengal in a state of flux. Born and brought up in Kolkata,I could not ignore its vibrations or the faces of its people. But tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin,so even my early work moves from the tragic to the comic, says the artist who got his big break in 1974 when German collector Rudi Kartel became his patron.

While there are bleak portraits of the city surrounded by mist and yellow light,starving urchins and statues of political leaders buried under rubble,there are also humorous comments,even on a stalwart like Rabindranath Tagore whose portrait appears several times in the show. A painting of a crow sitting on a Tagore statue amid overgrown foliage can be read as a strong comment on the death of ideals. The crow is a hardy and clever bird who can survive in the city like us humans. But the bird,unlike us,does not think twice before defecating on a statue, says the artist with a grin.

While his early works are gritty,his later celebratory,Krishna series,tends to border on the decorative. Ive tried to develop my own sensitivity around depicting mythology,I dont want it to become illustrative,which is why I have used pure colour and no ornamentation, says Shuvaprasanna. Nonetheless,the recent works lack the vigour of his earlier canvases and etchings. The etchings,however,exhibit a fine draftsmanship as he renders his favourite themes of crows,cats,birds and flowers in the time-consuming medium of acid bite on zinc plate.

Limited edition prints are available for R 2.25 lakh for a set of 12 small prints,and R 2.50 lakh for eight large prints.

The exhibition is on till March 3 at Lalit Kala Akademi.

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Lalit Kala Akademi