Retelling a story teller

Art & Deal Correspondent

The India Art Fair 2014 was busy, engaging and varied. It is always a challenge for the viewer to be able to concentrate and see art works in all this celebratory chaos. Art Konsult Gallery’s solo booth of Vinita Dasgupta, curated by Rahul Bhattacharya, offered some very skillful, deep understanding of portraiture. The layering of concept and skill by such a young artist and the interesting display caught a lot of attention, creating a pause in the busy-ness of the art fair. Once the pause was created, Dasgupta’s works took over the audience.Vinita Dasgupta, who came into the India Art Fair fresh from the opening of a six-artist show at The Viewing Room, Mumbai has been very busy ever since. Her works are also being showcased at the …………., gallery Lisbon. Today, she stands on the edge of her journey as an artist having travelled across many mediums and styles. Her earlier works reveal a deep love for expressing an autobiographical narrative, often using portraits; she created metaphors of herself and the realization of womanhood. Even at that point there was an attraction towards popular culture. Thus, it was not surprising that her works focus on fashion, cinema and
popular icons. There were also many changes in terms of medium, style and technique. Her natural flair is towards a modernist gestural approach to figuration, but possibly, the artist felt that that style came too easily for her. In an effort to challenge herself, Dasgupta began experimenting with controlled technique and began to introduce various compositional elements in her works. As the artist was going through a re-visitation of her personal understanding of style and technique, she also became more interested in telling stories about the world and her social empathies and engagements.
Yet, the search continued and she discovered that to work with popular imagery she needed to re-present them with greater conceptual layering. Also, that the gestural modernist within her can only be controlled if its rooted in the traditional. Her discovery of the Raghurajpur folk painting tradition finally lead to many aspects of this search and she has found a resting place from where she can explore future directions. This body of works ‘The Story Tellers’ marks an important turning point in her journey, specially reflecting a sustained engagement with technique, inspiration and concept.
Orissa has been a part of the artist’s childhood and that nostalgia has played an important role in Dasgupta being able to culturally respond to its artistic tradition. The Raghurajpur folk painting tradition also offered her different access to the ‘popular’. A ‘popular’ that was entrenched in a disciplined and controlled approach to art making, yet robust, colorful and deeply in dialogue with the culture of contemporaneity.