The (In)Visible and The (Un)Revealed: Inside the Secret Worlds of Kartick Chandra Pyne: A Survey Show

A prolific and highly original modern painter, Kartick Chandra Pyne (1931-2017) embarked on his long artistic career in the 1950s when the world and the very criteria of what constituted an art object were rapidly changing. He was deeply influenced by the experimental spirit of the time and adapted to the languages of modern Western art, moving away from academic realism which he excelled in as a student of the Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta. His early mature works, including Bird in a Cage, which fetched a record price at a Sotheby's auction in New York, 2005, an event that made Kartick Pyne overnight a big name in the artworld, reflect unique assimilation of the different styles and elements of both indigenous art and the modern art of the West.  

The genius of Kartick Pyne lies in his ability to create in his paintings a unique imaginary and fantastic world, differentially and not representationally connected to our habitual, real world. For Jogen Chowdhury, he is the foremost surrealist painter of his generation. A significant part of the show is devoted to the paintings of the imaginary world, which reveals an enigmatic phenomenon combining the visible and subliminal, mimetic and metaphorical in a rich affective pictorial language of eroticism. An inveterate introvert, deeply immersed in the world of religious devotion, Kartick Payne attempts at the eclectic synthesis of the Indian imagery and international idioms of modern art. His famous painting Moon Bath, shown in the landmark exhibition Asian Artists Exhibition: Modern Asian Art at Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan in 1979, was inspired by both Matisse and the Purnima night at his ancestral Thakur Bari (temple house) at Sodepur, Khardaha.    

Displaying the work spanning over sixty-year of his artistic career, the exhibition helps us to understand the complexities of Kartick Payne's eclectic style, which, though look naïve or like the outsider art, is firmly grounded on the academic training. Although he has often been categorized as a surrealist, he did not see it as a conscious choice: “I did not know that I worked in surreal style still it was pointed out to me. […] Thousands of thoughts play in my mind but the idea for a perfect picture is to create reality as a complete whole and encompass elements both the conscious and the subconscious” he told to the Indian Express. 

The exhibition will provide a glimpse of his lifelong quest for the perfect painting. 

'When I was young I too dreamt of going abroad, Paris or Rome, to see the work of the great masters. Now, I don't have the desire any more. If I go abroad now, I will get confused and everything will be messed up. I am doing my best work presently; people will recognize it in the future.' 

-Kartick Chandra Pyne    

“My father was an artist, fully engrossed in his world of art. He worked almost daily until the end of his life, as long as he could hold the brush to paint. He lived in the state of endless dream, which often surfaced in his work. It was not the fame or official recognition of his work, which came late in his life, that interested him. What truly interested him was the viewers’ reaction to his paintings. It happened quite often, when I returned home from one of his exhibitions, he eagerly looked at me and asked “Did anyone talk about my painting? Did they understand what I wanted to say in my work?” His life-long Sadhana was to communicate his ideas to others through his paintings. He lived the life of an artist, doing only painting and nothing else. But he did it extremely well.” 

-Apan Pyne 

(Son of Kartick Chandra Pyne)