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Artist's Statement

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Kaushik Gupta

02 January 1979, Born in Kolkata, India

Lives and Works in Kolkata

The popular culture surrounding us and our life is full of manmade commodities, machines and mass media. They are producing endless forms of visual clusters which is seductive, temporal all are buzzing in the mind. Though it has made our life easier and eventful, but all the while it has ruined the mental salvation of self. That is why to take a break I consciously work with intuitive, non narrative and non figurative forms.

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Through my canvases I have tried to touch the essence of life, the spiritual value and instinctive driving need amidst our modern hectic lives. I have tried to revitalize my thoughts and spirits, infusing warmth and sunshine. Thus I use paintings to record lives, by combining both realities and imagination — just as our memories are. It is a part as well as the whole. My works evoke the sense of a threshold - a way that opens toward and closes from various possibilities. The metaphysical and spiritual interpretations can be taken along till they merge with a purely non-religious and aesthetical plane. Similarly, the formal interpretations could collapse into the metaphorical and metaphysical realm. Even, I would like to move from here and do something totally different, where formal, aesthetical and spiritual values can merge into one. I also think that my works function against the fatal destiny. I think Art, whether it is figurative or abstract - is timeless, eternal and anti-destiny. Truly speaking, all abstract pictures contains time, and time containsspace in perfect unison. The forms and colours that come repeatedly in my works which remind the viewer of the chanting of a hymn, reverberating with the essence of life spirit.

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As a visual artist what I represent comes from my past and present surrounding. In fact the lack of faith in human establishments and their conventions made the artists to look for something else that could have transcended their materialistic insecurities. An alternative for the occidental homo-centric materialistic meta-narratives took the artists and philosophers to the oriental ways of thinking. Figurative narratives were collapsed to pave way for colour field abstractions and action based paintings. But the fact that the palpable religious symbolism could degenerate into another convention, which could help the proliferation of 'ritualism' in art, I consciously chose a path where the religious symbolism could demystify itself and become a part of the high-modern abstract language that defied regional and ritualistic boundaries.

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