Amitesh  Shrivastava

AVAILABLE WORKS  |  PUBLICATIONS

Amitesh Shrivastava obtained his BFA from Khairagarh University and MFA from MSU, Baroda. Amitesh’s works intensely debate the socio-cultural and philosophical notions of security in his painterly works. Qualified as quasi expressionistic works, Amitesh deliberately chooses an action oriented style to develop his pictorial surfaces. An artist who is an avid researcher on social hierarchies, he visualizes a human drama which is related to both the agrarian and technological economy.

“Amitesh’s concerns spill over from the general to the particular as he paints the images of a man with his children. He envisions a world of loneliness and the human being’s ultimate interest to step out into the zones of unknown. The work titled ‘Metro Dad’ shows the image of a man with his son and daughter at an imagined cross road, perhaps between the present and the future. According to the artist, it is almost like a self portrait of himself as time. He seems to be thinking about the security that he left behind in his rural background and his un-chartered journey into the ‘new’. Here the artist once again evaluates his convictions on adaptability within the given definitions of social positioning.

Dislocation of the individual from the lived past to an imagined future through the transition of technological present and the losses that this transition might incur, is one of the issues that Amitesh deals with in his paintings. His ‘Farmer’ series, though apparently detached from the prime notion of social security, indirectly takes the onlooker to an agrarian reality from which all other economic realities find their origin. Amitesh does not play the role of a judge in this context. On the contrary, he paints a couple of animated rural workers in the field. The economic insecurities of our immediate times, despite all our claims on industrial and technological growth, have found the core reason as the agricultural deficiencies caused by the so called ‘growth’. Amitesh draws an interesting parallel between the insecurities in social positioning and the basic cause, which is always overlooked by the common man, who leaves it to the experts. Amitesh, though not overtly political in his articulations, is political in his thinking and he finds cultural parallels and symbolism for expressing his concerns. His use of colors, subdued yet direct, hazy but thrusting is interesting, perhaps the renewal of a surface, which has been deliberately avoided by contemporary artists for making their image surfaces glossy and glittering with an unblemished perfection.” – Johny ML