Untitled (Isabelle in Black Dress)

In 1970, Paritosh Sen went to the U.S. on a John D. Rockefeller III Fund fellowship, which, along with his earlier Paris exposure, helped shape his modern, individualistic vocabulary. Later, based on experiences in Baltimore where he was a visiting professor at the Maryland Institute of Art, Sen did a series on Isabelle, a black woman, emphasising her sexuality but also shedding light on colour politics in the U.S. Beautiful, remote and lost in thought, and placed under some sort of house arrest, Isabelle is the classic unattainable female figure, spinning and dismissing a thousand mythologies springing around her.