The title, ‘Into The Half Light and Shadow Go I’, is the opening line from the Bodh (Sensation) which functions as a gateway to the curatorial framework of this show. It anchors the art of Jogen Chowdhury to the tradition of informed, and self-reflexive artistic responses to the human condition. The curatorial idea attempts to trace how the artist has been willing to encounter the signs of human angst from his early works, including the academic exercises which anticipate his human concerns vis-à-vis social reality. The renewed emphasis on these aspects offers a wider art historical context positing Jogen Chowdhury as one of the flag-bearers of mid-twentieth century Indian modernism which preferred enigmatic and self-reflexive images to explicit and agenda-based articulations.
Born in 1939, Jogen Chowdhury’s narrative treads a path through the pre-Partition to post-independent India. Right from childhood he experienced a life fraught with the aftermath of Partition, displacement in 1948 from a comfortable homeland and a difficult upbringing in a Kolkata refugee settlement since he was very young. Passing through the trauma and significant social changes, he worked his way, through the following decades to reshape the history of modern art in outstanding ways. As his artistic career progressed, after graduating from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata, he received a French Scholarship to study in Paris in 1968. Jogen Chowdhury’s career charts a perpetual growth, demarcated by the places he lived in and personal and cultural events that inspired him. Rooted in the sensorial response to the human condition, Jogen Chowdhury’s art reflects an empathy rare in modern Indian art. Satirical and introspective at turns, his representations of human form and relationships are incisive emerging from the oscillation between relative and reflecting modes of creative thinking.
