jayashree chakravarty

Layering works with figures, sites, and experiences already imprinted in her memory, Jayashree Chakravarty distills dreamlike cosmic spaces into the dimensions of painted canvas. Educated at Santiniketan and the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, Chakravarty was the Artist in Residence at the Ecole d'Art, Aix-en-Provence, France from 1992-95, and currently lives and works in Calcutta. Over a 25-year career, Chakravarty has unfolded multiple meanings from the interior of the mind, privileging for inspiration an organic, psychic journey over physical travels and realist landmarks.

Chakravarty's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in India and abroad, beginning in Baroda in 1982 and continuing in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and New Delhi throughout the 1990s. Set amongst the canvasses included in her 2002 New York exhibition, "The Mind Is Its Own Place," the artist also morphed a large-scale paper work into a tubular floor sculpture. That untitled work, with sprouted floral overlays, a textured translucence, and bold, angular lines, mapped a fictive locale traversed with thoroughfares like "Time Lane" and "Individual Road." As Chakravarty began to weave frequently between working on paper and on canvas at this time, her paper works took on monumental dimensions and her canvasses began to absorb a more finely applied, detailed line used to an effect of delicate, graded valences.

In "Memory Record," an exhibition of acrylic and oil on canvas paintings held in 2004 in Calcutta and at Gallery Chemould, Bombay, Chakravarty's untitled works interwove outlines of figural heads, the angular stencil of architectural elements, and strands of text that emerged only on careful reading. Muted colors and interpenetrating layers, interacting and receding at alternate nodes on the canvasses, formed a non-linear narrative of the artist's complex unconscious. The artist has noted that her application of multiple layers of paint tracks the wanderings of her thoughts, stating that "it is very lucid. I give shape to whatever drifts into my mind."

Alongside oil and acrylic on canvas paintings that developed earlier themes and motifs, the artist presented mixed media on paper works in a 2006 exhibition in Calcutta, "In the Very Face of Time." Experimenting with bold, expressive abstraction and modulated surfaces, these works reflect Chakravarty's continuous exploration of issues drawn from her own artistic journey.

Beth Citron