Metascapes that expose the subconscious mind’s intimate topography

Referencing historical styles such as Impressionism and Romanticism, Sharmistha Ray’s work also alludes to the lyrical agency of Helen Frankenthaler and other female vanguard artists, for whom color was based more on subjective, empirical methods instead of objective, pure theoretical systems.

Hers is still an opposing paradigm to the very construction of the Western art historical ideal, as evidenced in her choice of color, as well as the positioning of dense patterning. Her metascapes are suspended in time between reality and mythos, between abstraction and its opposite, to expose an intimate topography of the subconscious mind.

Born 1978 in Kolkata, the artist holds a dual degree from Pratt Institute (M.S. in Theory, Criticism & History of Art; M.F.A. in Painting). A recipient of the Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant, she held directorship positions at Hauser & Wirth and Bodhi Art, before again taking up painting full-time. Her recent body of oils on canvas, entitled ‘Hidden Geographies’ is on view at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai. In highly engaging works like ‘hidden geographies’, she postulates canonical ideals of beauty & the sublime by deftly distilling her personal memories, photos, acute observations plus experiences of landscapes - both natural and urban.

Her painterly idiom blends an unconventional palette and a dense network of gesture, impasto along with layering techniques, which is direct, visceral and emotive. Process holds the key wherein the varying viscosities and uneven layering of paint tends to creates cracks, ridges and crevices, exposing substratum of the painting in areas, even while obliterating it in others.

In her works, paint is poured and mixed onto the canvas in thick folds for it to striate and streak, producing imagistic manifestations of both organic and natural phenomena like riverbeds, sky and foliage. At other times it is painstakingly applied with a palette knife in small segments across the expanse of the canvas, to construct fragmentations.

Objects seem to dissolve at their edges just before creatively concretizing into form so as to reconfigure the relationship between abstraction and materiality.