Birth Centenary Of Gopal Ghose
Bengal Gallery showcases Ghose’s works
Late master artist Gopal Ghose (1913-1980) of Kolkata is one of the principal figures to have shaped the fine arts oeuvre of Kolkata. One of the founding members of ‘Calcutta Group’, an artists’ group formed in 1943, Ghose played an instrumental role in bringing art from West Bengal to the public. Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts at Dhanmondi, in association with Kolkata-based Akar Prakar Gallery, has displayed more than one hundred artworks by Ghose in a three-week exhibition to mark the artist’s birth centenary.
The exhibition, to say the very least, will not only introduce art aficionados and young enthusiasts to Ghose’s rich repertoire, but also give a general overview of the time Ghose worked in.
Gopal Ghose is generally known as a landscape painter with noticeable mixture of expressionistic and cubic styles. He is also customarily regarded as one of the most proficient watercolourists among Bengali artists.
While these two generalisations are well-applicable to Gopal Ghose, they do however, have limitations. To speak of the first generalisation, Ghose had a lifelong fascination for the beautiful landscapes of Bengal and of other parts of India; but there are many paintings where Gopal does well away with landscape. It is pertinent to mention that, Ghose was one of the few artists who produced a number of strong and impressive works on the 1943 famine.
Burning roads and vehicles, with despairing men are present in such works. Some of these paintings are on display at the exhibition.
To come to the second generalisation, while Ghose excelled in the quick and unpredictable medium of watercolour, he was quite adept in ink and pencil drawing, brush and pastel.
The ongoing exhibition will show all these qualities of the master artist. It is impossible not to be struck by Ghose’s experimentations with different mediums and by the resultant corpus of beautiful artworks.
‘For Gopal Ghose, painting was his religion. He never laid down his brushes till his death. I thank Bengal for organising such a beautiful exhibition’, said Mustafa Monwar, who inaugurated the exhibition on September 26.
The exhibition will be open for all from 12pm to 8pm till October 18. The gallery will remain closed from October 4 to 7 due to Durga Puja and Eid-ul-Azha.
-With New Age input
