CIMA Gallery’s Summer exhibition has emerged to became a major, annual show of talented, fresh, not–so–often heard artists from across India.
This event, gives an expansive perspective on contemporary Art as emerging from different regions, villages, suburbs and large cities of India.
The art on display here reveals unique, distinctive and strong expressions. The Summer Show is an exhibition which introduces both other artists as an alternative to the mainstream and vice versa. This exchange leads to an incredible show.
For enquiries contact Animesh at cimagallery@dataone.in

Debraj Goswami

(1973 – )
Bachelors from Kolkata and Masters at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, is the preferred option for young art students these days. Young Debraj Goswami is a fine example of the fusion of these two creative centres on two sides of the country. Debraj uses fragments from the much talked about arts of the past as metaphors to conjure up his statements. He embellishes them with a set of archetypal images, like fingers, nails and bulbs. A pointed finger figures in his paintings as a recurrent motif as does the nail. His enigmatic manner dissolves the borderline between awakening and dreaming. His is a somnambulist’s perilous journey through the corridors of the unconscious.

Loktarua (Scare-human)
acrylic on canvas | 2007
122cm x 91cm | 48" x 36" | Con. No. 4763

Dilip Kumar Samanta

Window Vision
acrylic on canvas | 2007
152.5cm x 121.8cm | Con. No. 4812

Ganesh Pyne

(1937 – )
Justly famous for his small tempera paintings, rich in imagery and symbols, Ganesh Pyne is one of the giants of Indian painters today. So much so that he is described as “an artist’s artist, a philosopher’s philosopher and master fantasist of them all.” Ganesh Pyne acknowledges the influence of great painters like Abanindranath Tagore, Hals Rembrandt and Paul Klee but he says that his exposure to Walt Disney’s cartoons and his own experience as a young animator in Calcutta finally liberated him and helped him develop two important stylistic features—distortion and exaggeration. He uses these to explore the deep recesses of his fantastical imagination to create uncanny images of disquieting creatures. The artist draws his inspiration from Bengal’s rich storehouse of folklore and mythology, stories that his grandmother told him in his childhood. The painter blends romanticism, fantasy and free form and an inventive play of light and shade to create a world of “poetic surrealism”. In the Indian miniature tradition, Pyne’s paintings should be savoured slowly and at leisure.

The Street Singer
conte on paper | 2002
36.6cm x 27.6cm | Con. No. 3877

Kingshuk Sarkar

(1972 – )
Kingshuk Sarkar could have bid goodbye to his student days along with the old century and old millennium when he finished his courses at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, in 1999. Instead, Kingshuk went on to the Kyoto University of Art and Design to train in the Japanese style of painting. He also mastered techniques of Japanese calligraphy and Sumi painting. This art practice and philosophy have profoundly influenced Kingshuk’s visual expression which is deeply rooted in Asian sensibilities. His art has an overall Asian significance and connotation. Kingshuk aspires to unify, within the constraints of a fragmented and fractured society, the indigenous with the global context. His spontaneous visual rendering bears direct reflection of this recurring concern.

Black
carbon, acrylic, animal glue and PVA over canvas
152cm x 197.6cm | 2008 | Con No. 4817

Bones and Ribs
carbon, acrylic, animal glue and PVA over canvas
121.5cm x 198cm | 2008 | Con No. 4818

Item
flex (triptych) Edition 1/3 | 2008
198cm x 121.8cm each | Con No. 4816

Lalu Prosad Shaw

(1937 – )
Lalu Prosad Shaw is a master of both printmaking as well as tempera. In printmaking, Lalu Prosad expresses his modernity, both in terms of technique and imagery. His imagery is taken from everyday life, depicting simple objects and events. In his small-sized tempera paintings one notices stylistic elements derived from the nineteenth-century Company School paintings and the Kalighat pat painting tradition. His single figures and still life are done in a style that is very indigenous and, yet, very sophisticated.

Mayank Kumar Shyam

(1987 – )
The involvement of artists like Mayank Kumar Shyam in the traditional practices of tribal and folk cultures tells its own story: it brings the subaltern perspective to India’s colonial past and the freedom movement. Especially when they are as gifted as Mayank Shyam, who is one of the finest practitioners of the ancient Gondi painting that is native to Madhya Pradesh. More, he has seamlessly transferred an indigenous art form to a contemporary one. In his paintings, the narrative aspect of this art has been kept but the story is about the modern city. The bird in one canvas, recalling the Garuda tales from the Vedas, is the witness and the artist is the scribe. Here, on this canvas, the ancient encounters the modern.

Prakash Ghadge

(1955 – )
Ghadge was born and educated in Art in Maharashtra. He has received six State (Maharashtra) awards and has had three solo shows in Mumbai. He has rarely been shown outside of Maharashtra, and this is the first time he is being shown in Kolkata. Within this context, Ghadge’s stark landscapes with their sense of seclusion gives an insight to this artist. He chooses to render nature through black because it “possesses a power with its innumerable grays” and because colour would “disguise the directness of my paintings.”

Rameshwar Broota

Profile coming soon

Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar

(1968 – )
East meets East in the art of Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar. A student of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Rashmi expanded her repertoire with a stint at Saga University of Fine Art in Kyoto, Japan, becoming proficient in the Nihonga style of traditional Japanese painting. Rashmi is currently working on a rare mode of tempera painting made of crushed semiprecious stones, at times mixed with layers of plated silver and gold. In Rashmi’s art the creative energy of Mother Nature forms the central construct. She presents a feminine perspective which is sensitive and powerful. Her medium fits perfectly with her expression—layered, soft and tender.

Rm. Palaniappan

(1957 – )
Palaniappan works in mixed media prints, embellishing his works with such things as rubber stamps, wax seals, collage materials and embossing. Bright and young, Palaniappan is interested in aeronautics and systems of notation which signify the specifics of time, place and sequence. The imagery usually appears to have textural and landscape elements. “Man has always wanted to fly as flight was a kind of release from space and time,” Palaniappan has said in an interview. “Numbers interest me because they are both finite and infinite,” he added. The juxtaposition of the static and the mobile, words and images, freedom and limitations are not new to Indian art. But the unique manner of Palaniappan’s presentation is indeed novel. His works can be interpreted to be Western connotations from an Indian perspective.

Sanjay Kashinath Sable

(1974 – )
Sanjay Kashinath Sable, a person born in the middle of the ‘Flower Power’ generation, in Osmanabad, studied Art in Mumbai (Sir J.J. School of Art) and Latur. He currently teaches Art in Nashik. Sable’s work is a blend of indigenous motifs and Modernist treatments. The single, bold image against a flat, solid background are elements of Modernism but his visual language is more akin to Indian, tribal and miniature traditions.

Sanjeev Sonpimpare

(1969 – )
This body of work by Sanjeev Sonpimpare, collected for his exhibition, is indicative of the duality which exists in contemporary, Indian, Urban life. His works are essentially conceptual but painted in a realistic style. The juxtaposition of positive and negative spaces suggests the tug-and-pull of energy between a burgeoning, on one side, city and a somnabulist citizenry, on the reverse. It is of a collapsing space, being sucked into a void and an expanding entity - expanding into space. Like a sleeping form, breathing in and out. In Sonpimpare’s City, what it is sustained by is also the source of its decay. Sonpimpare’s work have been labeled to be autobiographical because the artist includes his self portrait in most works. Sonpimpare says this is incidental, that he wants to share the sense of alienation which is both, a private and a universal experience, more common now than before.

Santosh More

(1969 – )
Born in Koregaon, Maharashtra, More graduated from J.J. School of Art in Mumbai with a B.F.A. degree where he excelled. More showed early signs of his talent. An introverted and reflective artist, Santosh More’s earlier paintings were more introspective. His current body of work shows a shift, of an artist reflecting on his space in the larger, urban landscape. His paintings are illusionary and deceptive. Although his technique is the use of flat paints, the textured surface of the canvas lend his paintings a tactile quality. Santosh More’s approach is meditative and artistic.

Shakila

(1969 – )
Shakila has no formal training in art but the skill with which she finishes her collages is something to marvel at. Shakila does not go in for the textual richness and surface relief which motivated cubists and constructivists to introduce collage into their painting as a technical innovation. Nor is she, like pop artists, interested in the new syntaxing of whole printed images for inversion of meaning, although she does construct new images by assembling bits of already printed images. But, in the process, she totally changes the original. She only chooses strips of paper that have the right hues, shades and tones so that she can give her images volume and foreshorten them when required. Her experience of life is reflected in her work but her flights of vision, including in the choice of paper she uses in her imagery, often lead to surprising constructions that, one suspects, are quite conscious and not random at all.

Uday Mondal

(1976 – )
Born in 1976, Uday Mondal completed his graduation from Rabindra Bharati Universtiy, Kolkata and his Masters from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. Uday works in acrylic medium. He batters photographic images with a number of tools loaded with colour to add a painterly effect to them. Post-Modernism has marked a return to the figure based narrative-painting where both photography and painting converge creating a dialogue between the two. Uday deliberately puts misleading titles to his paintings. His colours are heavy, flat and even brash and are not tonal. Uday creates a visual tension of complementary colours by placing, for instance, reds against green and so on in their utmost opacity.