The Bird that Sings Within: An Exhibition of Textile by Ajit Kumar Das
Exhibition Dates: January 10 – February 28, 2025
Place: Emami Art, 1st Floor Gallery, KCC
Preview on January 10, 4:30 pm onwards
Overview
The exhibition of one of India's foremost natural dye artists brings together some of his brilliant hand-painted recent natural dye fabric works, most of which the artist has not shown before. With a career spanning more than fifty years, Ajit Kumar Das creates works characterized by his love for nature – flowers, plants and birds – and his extraordinary skill, experiments and understanding of the medium of natural dye, enhanced, modified and refined by his decades-long working experience in the Weavers' Service Centres (WSCs) in Ahmedabad, Guwahati and Kolkata. His works greatly admired by luminaries like Haku Shah, Riten Mozumdar and craft revivalist Martand Singh show a delicate blending of professional craftsmanship and refined artistic visions.
Centred around the theme of nature, the exhibition speaks of the relevance of beauty in today's prosaic worlds, the aesthetics of artistic craftsmanship and ecological ethics.
About the artist
Ajit Kumar Das was born in 1957 in Tripura to a traditional washer family who worked for the royal family of Maharaja Udaymanikya. He came to West Bengal around 1972 and started his first job in a block printing unit in Srerampore in 1976. In 1980, he joined the Weavers' Service Centres (WSCs), where he worked as a master craftsman at WSCs for many years in Ahmedabad, Guwahati and Kolkata, until his retirement from his service in 2017.
He has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including the one at Nandan Art Gallery (Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, 1993); 'The Cloth is Canvas' at Eicher Art Gallery (New Delhi, 1997), 'Colours of Nature' at ICCR (Kolkata, 2014), and many more. During his WSC years, he participated in numerous group shows and major historical exhibitions, such as the Vishwakarma (London, 1982), Sweden Festival (1986), Animals (New Delhi, 1990s), all of them curated by legendary craft revivalist Martand Singh, and India Festival by Handicrafts & Handlooms Exports Corporation of India Limited (Gallery Lafayette, France, 1994).
He received many awards and honours, notably the Government of India's National Award in 1987 and the Kalamani Award in 1993. His works are part of significant international collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Embassy of France, New Delhi; World Bank, New Delhi; Nandan Museum, Visva Bharati; Sarabhai Foundation, India; Crafts Museum, India; The Museum of Fine Arts, Hutson and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
Ajit Das lives and works in North 24 Pargana.