Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri is a painter, designer, printmaker and weaver, and in his work, the different qualities of the disciplines intermesh. Since a student of the art school, Sibaprasad has shown his attraction to abstract art, exploring the fundamental geometric forms and the dynamics of positive and negative space. Rich in colours and bold in the planer and linear constructions, his works are by no means an avant-gardist search for the pure form, cutting off everything that connects art with life or society. On the contrary, they are closely linked to the environs of different places he lived in his long career that spans over fifty years.
Painting is Sibaprasad’s preferred medium. However, in the late 1980s, as he joined Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan as a faculty member, he started his well-known tapestry works, which he calls “drawings on the loom.” Given his long experience working with professional designers and weavers in Calico Mills or NID, Ahmedabad, he knew the craft of textiles and tapestry very well. Still, he explored it as a medium of creative expression in Santiniketan. Regarding his tapestry works, KG Subramanyan comments on the ambivalence at the heart of his artistic imagination. The broken lines, abstract geometric forms, and colour fields faintly suggest a landscape or a scene with atmospheric nuances.
Sensitive to the country’s multicultural heritage, he draws inspiration from diverse sources, from American Abstract Art to local folk pottery. In his recent works, the diamond appears as the central motif, which he found painted on a local earthen pot and was deeply inspired by its unique shape. For him, it is a remarkable discovery of a new and abstract form, modern and primitive.