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| IAAC & Aicon Gallery Fine Art Benefit Auction |
| Shyamal Dutta Ray |
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Shyamal Dutta Ray
Man Crawling |
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Born 1934, in Bihar, India.
Shyamal Dutta Ray's work is an ode to his city, Kolkata. In lucid strokes, Ray's slanted skylines capture the city's quixotic decay and grandeur. Even as she aspires to a new architecture in an era of economic liberalization and aggressive construction, Kolkata's beauty still resides in the subjects that Ray depicts- its people.
On the streets of Kolkata, Ray observes common citizens and the drama of their lives. In their faces he intuits musings, idiosyncracies, and stories of the human condition. As much his street scenes, Ray's abstractions are a study of the human psyche- of the surreality and epic melancholy in every human life.
Ray is known for his reinvention of the Indian watercolor. Unlike his regional antecedents in the medium- the Company Painters and the Bengal School, he captures an expressionist intensity and an unparalleled range of emotion in his subjects.
Ray was born 1934 in Ranchi, Bihar, and spent his early childhood in the countryside before moving with his family to Kolkata, where he would study art at the Government College of Arts and Crafts. He came of age at the end of British Raj and the early days of a newly independent India, during a decade shaken by the Second World War, and in a Bengal plagued by the Famine of 1943.
Ray was one of the founders of the Society of Contemporary artists in Kolkata in 1992. Today, his work is exhibited in the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Glenbarra Museum in Japan. He passed away at the age of 71 and is remembered by his peers for, among other things, his discerning sense of humor.
Died 2005. |
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