When renowned artist Sudhir Patwardhan came across Anupam Roy’s “very large, predominantly monochromatic” art works for the first time in 2019, he was struck by their “brute force”.
“Bizarre bodies and landscapes took shape through dense black lines, patterns and masses. It was a surreal world deeply rooted in reality,” Patwardhan wrote in ‘Weaving Labyrinths’, a book containing small-scale reproductions of Roy’s work.
Roy was then having his first solo show in the city, titled ‘De-Notified Land’, at Project 88, a Colaba-based art gallery. The show featured his journals with notes and drawings, large drawings pasted on cloth, a few oil paintings and banners – bearing witness to struggles over land in various parts of the country and the sufferings of those on the margins.
But the most striking exhibits were gigantic paper works with human-like figures and animals in dystopic settings, nearly all depicted in black, with colours used only for emphasis.
Roy’s current show at Project 88, titled ‘…ing: Sceneries without Sovereignty’ marks a departure of sorts. Like the earlier one, it dwells on land and belonging, and features work in multiple mediums, including two 33-feet-long drawings showing a plethora of wildlife in the marshes, all depicted in black. But paintings where he uses colours stand out in sharp contrast, despite familiar, fluid boundaries in them between the human and natural worlds.
“This show is quite a leap from the first one,” said Sree Goswami, owner and curatorial director, Project 88. “It is more layered and raises questions about how violent struggles over land are portrayed and how we understand them.”
