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Probabilities of Occurring 

Arunanshu Chowdhury 

December  21 - January 15, at  Gallery Sumukha  in collaboration with

The Guild

The Guild Art Gallery and   Gallery Sumukha  are delighted to present the works of Arunanshu Chowdhury.  Born in 1969, Chowdhury  has studied Painting at  M.S. University, Vadodara. Over the years he has had many group and solo shows, the most recent and prominent ones being, “Contemporary Art In India” at Lasselles gallery, Singapore and “Metamorphosis”, a show of Baroda artists at Asian Cultural Centre, New York.

An ability to capture the historical sense of probabilities is what goads Arunanshu Chowdhury towards the making of his paintings. While some artists vouch for the tested and proven language, others like Arunanshu indulge in encapsulating the experiential in newer forms through skilful redeployment of the images and symbols. For him, history is repetitive in nature, giving hints to both the rulers and subjects about the tragic designs through which the human 'progress' is laid out. Continuity of events, negating the linearity through overlapping and auto-juxtapositions necessitates and forces erasures and blurring of memories. This blurred vision of the immediate as well as of the past helps the human beings to embrace power structures that subjugate them through extreme indoctrinations. Arunanshu, like a historian passes through the contingent events, looks for the areas of overlapping in order to exemplify the uncanny nature of 'progress' and by disputing this imposed systemic progression masquerading as the desirable value of life, he contemplates on the historical probabilities that resist erasures.

Images that Arunanshu uses in his paintings are local and global at the same time. Bombs fitted with target sensing appendages for precise hit, monumental chairs from museums and barbershops, concrete boulders for preventing land erosions, auto rickshaws, graffiti, embroidered clothes, documentary photographs, mirrors, household utensils, religious sculptures, broken toys, moveable knick-knack shops, fire tending machines, ladders, images from the collective art historical memory and so on constitute the image repertoire of Arunanshu. He, from the vantage point of art, shows how events and images of erosion and erasure are overlapped and juxtaposed in due course of time. The triumph of human resistance is celebrated against the history's internal dynamics of submerging and overlapping.

Destruction and denial as the constituents of history play an important part in Arunanshu's creative thinking. These tools take the shape of precision bombs in his works. The immediacy is implied through the images like a hand driven sugarcane juice machine, cycle rickshaw, knick-knack selling shop, broken toys etc. In the same picture plane, at the horizon the artist paints the fortresses that were once the seats of human power and engagement. Bringing the past and present, which remain only as inscriptions, here they become a pointer towards the human catastrophe caused by war and destruction. The surface is created by multiple layers of different materials including cloth and paper and the textures that result in while painting over are retained to exude a feeling of submerging and emerging. The painted images overlap with the textures and graffiti. The final painting seems to be an outcome of the reclamation of images as well as the erasure of the same. Arunanshu Chowdhury does not record events for the sake of recording but he looks for the probabilities of it occurring, as a true historian does.

At

Gallery Sumukha

24/10, Bts Depot Road,

Behind Parijma Medical Centre,

Wilson Garden,

Bangalore-560027