Untitled

This painting with haunting imagery is from a time when life in Calcutta was a daily experience of uncertainty due to political upheaval, power shortages and strikes, to soon get compounded by the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. In the work here, Chowdhury gives expression to those turbulent times through images of a humped bull and sinister mask of the ruler as symbols of dark happenings. Wooden nude figures perform a puppet dance though both the string pullers and the strings are invisible. The contour lines and paints suggest a dimension and a play of tones, but the two-dimensionality remains intact.