…. Curator’s Pen by Prabuddha Ghosh

Ritwik Ghatak: Between the Burden of Living and the Burden of Ideology Birthday Tribute to a Filmmaker Who Could Never Separate Cinema from Life by Prabuddha Ghosh. There are filmmakers who observe life, and then there are those who carry its wounds within themselves. Ritwik Ghatak belonged to the latter. His cinema was never merely an artistic exercise; it was an intensely personal engagement with a society struggling to survive its own historical contradictions. Born into an age he himself described as one of “troubled times,” Ghatak witnessed the Second World War, the Bengal Famine of 1943, Partition in 1947 and the devastating communal violence that followed. These were not distant historical events for him. They became permanent fractures in his consciousness. For Ghatak, the tragedy of Partition was not simply the division of geographical territory. It was the disintegration of belonging, memory, language and cultural continuity. Having his ancestral home in East Bengal, he...

Echoes of Displacement and Line: The Artistic Odyssey of Jogen Chowdhury by Prabuddha Ghosh Jogen Chowdhury, he honed his foundational skills at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata (1955–1960), later expanding his global perspective through a French Government scholarship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1965–1967). Chowdhury’s professional journey flourished across prestigious roles, serving as an art keeper at Rashtrapati Bhavan and later as a professor and principal at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan. Renowned for his expressive linework and intricate cross-hatching, Chowdhury utilizes muted earthy tones and dry-brush techniques to portray distorted, contorted human figures that reflect societal decay, vulnerability, and psychological tension. Honored with prestigious accolades like the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award, Kalidas Samman, and Banga Bibhushan, his profound oeuvres bridge classical tradition with modern exp...

Mahirwan Mamtani: Everywhere a Stranger, Everywhere at Home  by Prabuddha Ghosh The ICIA Gallery Kala Ghoda, Mumbai presents Everywhere a Stranger, Everywhere at Home , an exhibition exploring the artistic vision of Mahirwan Mamtani, a significant figure in Indian modernism and the Neo-Tantric Art movement. Bringing together ten works from his Centrovision and Cosmic Geometry series of the 1990s, the exhibition offers an insight into the artist’s lifelong engagement with geometry, spirituality and the search for belonging. Borrowed from the writings of German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the exhibition’s title captures the paradox of feeling both at home and a stranger. For Mamtani, born in 1935 in Sindh, this idea is rooted in personal history. Following Partition in 1947, he migrated to India with his family, an experience that profoundly shaped his artistic outlook. His search for belonging gradually moved beyond geographical identity towards an exploration of the inn...

Prabuddha Dasgupta: Between the Frame and the Unspoken   By Prabuddha Ghosh A photograph by Prabuddha Dasgupta rarely ends at its frame: Look at the sleeping woman. The modest Goan interior. The Buddhist boy moving almost insignificantly through the vastness of Ladakh. The naked body suspended between intimacy and anonymity. A flower, a staircase, a landscape, a face. These are not simply subjects encountered by a camera; they are fragments of larger, unfinished narratives . Dasgupta leaves something deliberately unresolved, allowing the viewer to enter the image rather than merely look at it. This is where his practice becomes particularly significant. He photographs what is visible, but constructs what is not: His visual language operates through subtraction. Black and white, stillness, isolated forms, controlled light, deep shadows and pared-down compositions repeatedly bring the image towards an essential state. His own assertion that the superficial did not interest him, a...