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  Celebration, Oil on Canvas, 36" x 48"
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  Powdery, Amorphous, Hot as Yello, Acrylic on Canvas, 36" x 30"
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  Captivity, Acrylic on Canvas, 55" x 61"
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  Migrating Vase, Watercolour on paper, 18" x 22"
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  Man Ray's Wife and Olive Leaf, Brass, Iron , wood, 48" x 42"

‘Pastiche’, a group show of West Bengal based artists hosted by the ABS Red Earth Gallery, Baroda, could arouse some interests. Despite the curatorial enthusiasm, the show could have hit the bull’s eye, had it been placed in an open ended premise and accommodated a few more artists, feels Amrita Gupta Singh.

Kolkata is on the throes of change; after years of conservative Marxist rule and a fractured political history, the city is hurtling towards frenzied transformation, of modern industry, flyovers, real estate boom, malls and an optimistic youth. Yet, it has already started experiencing the pit-falls of this transformation, the recent happenings of Singur is a case example. It would be interesting to investigate how contemporary artists of Bengal are positioned in this change, or is this change happening too fast to grasp for many? How are artists reacting to both their immediate presents and pasts, and how does this inter-face affect contemporary art practice in Kolkata? How does the regional-modern or even the regional (post)-modern feature in their works?

It is with these many questions in my mind that I visited the exhibition, “Pastiche” hosted by the ABS Gallery in Baroda. Curated by the spirited young art historian, Aparna Roy, the show consisted of paintings, sculptures and prints. As she says, “The premise was to focus on artists working in West-Bengal and on new faces…without a particular theme. The title Pastiche came to the fore. This curatorial project becomes a pastiche as it consists of elements from various sources…the typicality or adherence to a particular sensibility has altered to diverse styles…The exhibition is not aimed to be a parochial utterance, but to represent a group of artists from a particular region working with all their plurality”.

A fine premise, and while Roy’s first curatorial project is indeed commendable, many of the works in themselves did not evoke excitement in the viewer.  The exhibition had a good spread of male and female artists, and the representation of the women artists were very engaging, both in terms of pictorial language and experimentation of mediums, which one could link to the curator’s own theoretical preoccupation with women artists of India. Chandana Hore, Paula Sengupta, Pampa Panwar, and Manjari Chakravarty’s works displayed individualistic parameters via the aspects of feminine experiences and feminine spaces. Of the male artists, Partha Shaw, Rajib Mondol, Rathin Kanji, Tanmay Santra and Tridib Bera’s works displayed an engagement with urban concerns via both abstract and object-defined styles. But the other works were rather disheartening, and several omissions gave this exhibition a quantitative, than qualitative thrust.

One could also question if this exhibition was a comprehensive representation of the plurality of art practices in Bengal. If the premise was meant to be open-ended, one could have included artists like Partha Pratim Deb (though he belongs to an older generation, yet he is one of the fine artists who had carved out a very individualistic art language, Duchampian in approach), Adip Dutta, Sanchayan Ghosh, Amrita Sen, Chattrapati  Dutta, Shreyashi Chatterjee, to name a few, who are constantly pushing at the constructed hierarchies of art practice in a lively representation of the regional-modern/post-modern as we understand the terms in contemporary Indian art history today.