Solo exhibition presenting the recent watercolours and prints by Indrapramit Roy

Solo exhibition presenting the recent watercolours and prints by Indrapramit Roy

Kolkata, 25th February, 2023:Emami Art, one of India’s leading contemporary art galleries, presents Soliloquy, a solo exhibition of noted Indian artist Indrapramit Roy. The show, which consists of over fifty watercolours and prints, will open on February 24, 2023, on Gallery’s fifth floor, and is on view through April 15, 2023.

Done in 2020 during the covid-19 –induced lockdowns, the works – a solitary conversation of the artist with himself – bear the marks of the time. Locked at home and separated from the outside world, the lockdown phases offered the artist a space for introspection, contemplation, and inspiration for creating new kinds of work. Soliloquy is a unique body of work in Indrapramit Roy’s entire artistic oeuvre.

The exhibition has three watercolour series– quarantine diary, quarantine drawings and cacti – and large independent watercolours and prints. They show how remarkably ordinary objects and phenomena like rippling water, clouds, unfinished building construction and cacti turn into extraordinary, powerful visual images, revealing evocative and poetic use of the medium. Instead of painting ideas, Indrapramit Roy depicts what is visible and present before us. But, unlike realistic paintings, his work aims to capture psychological and spatial transient moments. For this, he finds watercolour more suitable than other mediums. Many of the pieces emerged from his daily habit of drawing and reading.

Text used in the painting is often used as the works’ titles. But they do not signify the content. They instead run parallel to the visual image creating third meanings or texts. Therefore, the image-text dialogue is one crucial aspect of the works in the exhibition.

“The works in Soliloquy were mostly done or at least started during a time when the whole world was in the throes of a cataclysmic contagion. A time that forced me to contemplate the human condition in the relative safety and isolation of my studio. The bombardment of terrible news punctuated with laughable political shenanigans, the steady stream of information mixed with disinformation created a peculiar mental state that veered from anxiety to panic and swung between clarity and clutter alternatively.

I cannot paint ideas but only what is ‘paintable’. Perhaps, that is one of the reasons why text plays such an important role in this body of work – creating a third text when seen together with the visuals. There are 54 watercolours belonging to three different suits of different sizes and two prints in this exhibition. The show has traveled from Baroda to Delhi and now at  Emami Art Kolkata in its third and final iteration. I am very excited to show my most recent works in the city of my birth after a hiatus of six years.” Indrapramit Roy, Artist

“I am delighted that we are presenting renowned contemporary artist Indrapramit Roy’s solo exhibition, which consists of over fifty watercolours and prints done chiefly during the pandemic in 2020. The works, the artist’s solitary conversation with himself, bear the marks of the hard times, revealing a sense of silence, solitude and keen observation of water, cacti and twilight scenes of the city limits. What attracted me is the intense gaze that transforms what is ordinary into something extraordinary and the evocative use of the watercolour medium. I hope the city’s art lovers will enjoy the exhibition.” Richa Agarwal, CEO Emami Art.