| Medium | : | Mixed Media |
|---|---|---|
| Height | : | 12 inch / 30.5 cm |
| Width | : | 12 inch / 30.5 cm |
| Dimension | : | W: 30.5 cm × H: 30.5 cm |
An evocative 2003 mixed-media work by Shyamal Dutta Roy, featuring layered abstracted faces and intense textural contrasts that explore memory, fragmentation, and psychological depth.
Shyamal Dutta Ray | Untitled | Mixed Media on Paper | 12 x 12 inches | 2003
This untitled mixed-media work by Shyamal Dutta Roy (2003) demonstrates the artist’s powerful engagement with abstraction and fragmented figuration through a raw, tactile visual language. Executed on paper, the composition is structured around a dense interplay of black, white, and earthy brown tones, where heavily worked surfaces and scratched textures create a sense of erosion and psychological weight. Abstracted facial forms and partial profiles emerge and recede within layered cross-hatching and gestural marks, suggesting human presence without settling into complete representation. Vertical, rust-colored passages at the edges act like symbolic pillars or boundaries, framing the central field and heightening the sense of containment. The tension between bold, assertive strokes and finer, obsessive mark-making evokes themes of memory, disintegration, and inner conflict. Roy’s approach emphasizes process and materiality, allowing accident and abrasion to play a central role, resulting in a composition that feels both archaic and contemporary—an expressive meditation on the fractured human condition.
Laden with satire and wit, and often subtly political, Shyamal Dutta Ray’s work communicated his preoccupation with the human condition.
Among the most accomplished watercolourists of modern India, he was born in Ranchi, then in Bihar, and studied at Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, from 1950-55. He was a founding member of Society of Contemporary Artists in 1959, and of Painters 80, founded in 1968.
Dutta Ray suffered from severe ill-health while growing up and witnessed the horrors of the 1943 Bengal famine as a child, both of which impacted his life and art tremendously. He began his career working in oil but had to switch to watercolour on medical advice as he was allergic to oil paints. Dutta Ray became a master of the demanding medium of watercolour and brought about a major development in its application by using saturated hues instead of the diluted colours prevalent among his contemporaries. He painted the contradictory contemporary reality of Calcutta, filled with sorrow, poverty, despair, as also happiness, and hope.
The masterful depiction of pathos in watercolours won him several awards within India and abroad including the gold medal of Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, in 1958, the Rabindra Bharati University award in 1968, several annual awards of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta, Lalit Kala Akademi’s national award in 1982, and the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath award and the Shiromani Puraskar, both in 1988. He passed away in 2005.
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