Sanat Kar
Opening Reception
Friday, October 13, 6 – 9pm
Gallery Arts India
206 5th Avenue (Between 25th and 26th St)
New York, New York 10010
(212) 725 6092
Born in 1935 in Kolkata, Sanat Kar is both a painter and a printmaker, par excellence. He has been recognized for his experimentation and innovation in printmaking, wood intaglio, cardboard intaglio and sunmica. In the 1980's, he began working in oil, tempera, and more recently has sculpted in bronze as well.
Trained in painting at the Government College of Art, Kolkata, Kar has been immersed in the Bengal art scene and in art academia. Beginning in 1974, he trained young artists at Kala Bhawan in Santiniketan for 20 years- as the department head for graphic art and later the principal. In 1953, Kar was one of the founders and Secretary of Artist's Circle in Kolkata, and 1960, a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists.
Siva Kumar points to the Bengal School's Kshitindranath Majumdar as Kar's antecedent for their similar choice of subject matter. To extend this comparison, stylistically, the gentle, defined curvature of Kar's creaturely faces echo Bengali folk styles. Atthe same time, expressionist strains in Kar's works can evoke Edvard Munch.
Soft, theatrical light and variations in hue invigorate a limited chromatic scale and creating a lyrical depth in Kar's work. He alludes to ideas about the afterlife, to an elusive distinction between life and death, conscious and unconscious. In the surrealistic world he concocts, ethereal, human-like beings inhabit allegories about the psyche and seem to be its rudiments anthropomorphized.
Kar has recieved an award from the AIFACS, New Delhi, in 1973, and the West Bengal State Lalit Kala Academy Award in 1993, among others. He has featured in the Festivals of India in the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union, the British International Prints Biennale, The Fourth International Prints Show in Poland and the Berlin Intergrafik.