Delving the Dark

March 22, 2024 - April 6, 2024 at Akar Prakar, Kolkata

The Faculty of Visual Arts completed its 50th year in 2022.

For over more than five decades now, individuals coming to the faculty as teachers from established institutions have made attempts to define the academic presence, resulting in a confluence of ideas and expressions. Currently, a sizable portion of the teaching strength is formed by individuals who have studied at the institution. This becomes furthermore significant in the formation of a democratic language of artistic cultivation. This has been through a process of reconciliation between the pedagogic focus of the different institutions.

Professor Partha Pratim Deb has played a pivotal role in laying the artistic-academic foundation of the faculty along with many others. Recently the Dept. of Graphics-Printmaking has been privileged enough to receive a body of linocut prints by Professor Deb. The exhibition is constituted of these seventeen prints by Professor Partha Pratim Deb, and twenty- eight prints by the teachers of the Faculty of Visual Arts, leading off from them. This is to mark the generosity of one of the former teachers of the faculty, who is also a significant practitioner in his own right. The teachers, coming as they do from different specialisations and personal practices, have each brought their own unique aesthetics and material approaches to their prints, as also their artistic and conceptual concerns. Translated into black-and-white, these prints carry traces from the painterly to the sculptural, from graphic to digital, and even the linear qualities of the needle worked line.