Recent Works

In Ashok Bhowmik’s work there is a certain dynamism, led by an organic growth on one end and a controlled construction on the other. This has helped Bhowmik to create a visual language that had thrived on myriad of different artistic phases. In this show, works come out of a peculiar sensibility of an artist who tries to challenge his own visual language by leaving as well as carrying some very important elements from his own visual repertoire.

‘Black’ plays a critical role both visually and cerebrally. Apart from its symbolic connotation black itself becomes an individual almost like a fluid body where different forms, elements are always in an act of fragmented growth. This act transcends the whole visual space into an arena of performance held within and without the space and form.

Amidst this push and pull of form and space, time discreetly enters without letting anyone know. Here the works are not mere testimony of time but an endless stream, primordial and existential in nature. Interestingly, within that flow Bhowmik’s imageries get carved, creating a visual and cerebral conversation with the time. The time that Bhowmik’s artistic career evolved through, has its presence in the pictorial surface as well as in the seasoned psyche of the artist.

The time on one hand is boundless, but at the same time it is also contextual and carries a strong social, political and cultural consciousness for the artist. In the late seventies, Ashok Bhowmik did a series of works that captures the mind of a young artist who has gone through the horrors of Emergency and Naxalite movement in late sixties and early seventies. The artist in his own peculiar way captures the time through quasi-real, uncanny world of insect. The characters are weaved out of dark humour and wit, they play, they act but there is more than that, there is a kind of suppressed anxiety, a chaos that looms over the planes of these works. The Insect Series, carries the consciousness of the time.

It can be said that the artist has seasoned those consciousness, ideas and matured it in his current body of works. The arbitrary signs, the mutilated forms, composite figuration and quasi-mechanical forms goes beyond his ideas of his early works of Insect series. It has certainly come a long way from the looming darkness of the insect world rather Bhowmik now explores stories, memories and imageries that grows from his own visual understandings. The dehumanized world of earlier period, where hope is nowhere to be found and darkness rules over everything, heads towards different form of understanding. In his current body of work those sensibilities can be found in the forms, figures of mutilated horse or that of a quasi-mechanical sea creature or that of a disfigured female body clad with a shawl, evokes incidents , memories of recent past, that has gone through layers of artists mind and got translated into his recent body of works.

It is true that Ashok Bhowmik’s recent work deals with a sense of anxiety, crisis which is inevitably existential. But unlike the overwhelming darkness of his earlier work Bhowmik subtly plays with light, where his chalky white and sometimes translucent background restricts the darkness from spreading. It is not an act of balance but an act of creating visual dilemmas and tensions that enhances the interaction in the pictorial surface. The show becomes an interesting space where one can witness the transformation of an artist’s mind in action.