Important Notice

Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting early in his career because of their rigid academism and the bourgeois leanings they implied. Instead, the artist looked to the Indian family and traditional folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often distortedly, recall people from his daily life - from Bengali housewives and their husbands to the... Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting early in his career because of their rigid academism and the bourgeois leanings they implied. Instead, the artist looked to the Indian family and traditional folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often distortedly, recall people from his daily life - from Bengali housewives and their husbands to the politicians and businessmen on the streets of New Delhi. Through Chowdhury's unique development of form and his detailed communication of posture and relationships, these ordinary figures are magnified and endowed with a mythical lyricism that transports them from the mundane to the theatrical.

"Jogen has long been an ironist, training his sardonic eye on the concupiscence and suspicion that underpin human relationships, the scorn and loathing that are so often the obverse of the coin of love. His eye is peculiarly satirical in its ability to strip its subjects down to their primal instincts. Yet it is also sensually connoisseurial, in the manner in which it dwells on such details as a tumescent breast or a crimped stomach. And it is compassionate, also, in its evocation of the intricate tapestry of motives and actions that is human behaviour. Oscillating between sentiment and satire, Jogen's attitude suggests a dark romanticism, impelled by a tender sympathy with human fallibility" (Ranjit Hoskote, A Calligraphy of Touch and Gaze, Kalakriti Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006, not paginated).

In the present lot, the artist uses a network of intricate cross-hatches to build and lend volume to the figures of a man and woman, the former lounging with one foot outstretched across the surface, and the latter bashfully averting her gaze from his naked body. The moment passing between the couple, each figure meticulously detailed in ink and lightly coloured with pastels, is heightened by their placement against a dark ground devoid of any features. In this frozen moment, Chowdhury creates a space in which we can explore the dynamics of the relationship between his subjects, a theme he has frequently returned to in his work. "One of the subjects that has repeatedly occurred in my paintings is the man-woman relationship and the various facets of it. I am fascinated with the complexity, the sensitivity and the dramatic element in it. Such relationships embrace a prime area of our lives and I enjoy focusing on these relationships" (as quoted R. Siva Kumar, Jogen Chowdhury - Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Museum, Himeji, 2005, p. 76).

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