Flower of Fire

‘Gopal Ghose brought a bright world of colours to us’, wrote Shyamal Dutta Ray, one of his early students. Ray speaks for all of us: the intensity of Ghose’s colour palette never loses its power and impact. His passionate expressionism makes Gopal Ghose (1913-80) one of the most remarkable and individual artists to emerge from Bengal in the twentieth century.  

A founding member of the short-lived but iconic Calcutta Group, Ghose first exhibited his work in the late 1940s with other group members, sometimes alongside those of the Progressive Artists Group of Bombay. He held his first solo exhibition in Calcutta in 1952, and subsequently contributed works to many exhibitions in India, the USA, and the UK. The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi staged his retrospective exhibition in 2013. 

Despite this exposure, Gopal Ghose is yet to receive the full recognition that is due to him. Executed mostly on paper, his art avoids the grand-scale gestures of other leading modern masters. His landscapes and still-life pieces are small, but they are explosive. When we allow ourselves to be drawn into his world, we encounter an ever-observant eye and a sometimes-troubled mind, and we meet the full force of the passionate intensity of their expression. 

This exhibition is based around DAG’s unrivalled holdings of the artist’s finished works, sketches and notebooks, and draws on new archival research on his life.