“It’s not just that Karmakar paints nudes, although male nudity is somehow far more problematic than female nudity. That Karmakar’s nudes aren’t stylised like, say, Husain’s or the Greco-Roman nudes of antiquity, but very real, almost photographic, somehow makes them worse, as does the fact that he doesn’t paint the over-muscled body beautifuls who strut the ramp but the slightly plump, soft contours of his own body, and that of many an Indian male of that age and station in life.”

– Gargi Gupta for Business Standard, New Delhi, October 4, 2008

In a second review of his recently concluded solo at Gallery Espace in New Delhi, Janice Pariat wrote for Time Out Delhi, “Karmakar’s work explores the problematic nature of our attitudes to gender and sexuality. In one painting – set in a messy hotel room – a man lies on a bed bound at his ankles and presumably his hands. The room is littered with “feminine” objects: high heels, make-up, even a silky satin dress. Physically and metaphorically, he is unable to freely embrace them, even while alone and in secret. In another picture, a man in a skirt crawls through a doorway, in search of something, perhaps a way out of gender constraints.”

Abir Karmakar was born in 1977 in Siliguri, and attained a B.V.A. in Painting at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata and an M.A. in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. Besides group exhibitions such as the gallery weekend at the Baumwollspinnerei Factory Complex in Leipzig earlier this year, he has had four solo exhibitions, namely Within the Walls at Gallery Espace, New Delhi and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, 2008, In The Old Fashioned Way, Aicon Gallery, London, 2007, Interiors, Galerie Heike Curtze, Berlin, 2006, and from my photo album, The Museum Gallery, Mumbai, 2005. Gayatri Sinha in her essay for the current exhibition contextualizes the work of this young painter within the oeuvre of Bhupen Khakhar: “The twilight hues of Khakhar’s streets and public parks are replaced by interiors with drawn drapes. The pop elements so appropriate to the street have no place: if Khakhar reflected on the unremarkable middle aged figure – occasionally mutilated – Karmakar obsesses on the invitational gaze, directed towards his own body, one that responds with desire. Through this direct engagement of the gaze, he makes the viewer complicit in the act as voyeur. If Khakhar appears to paint like a casual diarist, Karmakar’s painterly style, drawing on a wealth of domestic detail, is highly mannered.”

Sinha goes on to observe that the luminous hues of Karmakar’s painted surface recall de Kooning’s comment ‘Flesh was the reason oil painting was invented’. “The other influence is the realization of his own body as a site for resolution. The sexual self is not covered away for the acceptable social gaze. Rather it is rendered with a brutal expressivity to enact, expose and question its limits. For both the viewer and the artist, the essential clause of pleasuring the body will come with acceptance; that all desire is born from the freedom to enact the self.”

Within the Walls

ABIR KARMAKAR

November 8 – 22, 2008

Preview and Brunch: Saturday, November 8, 2008, 12 noon to 5 pm

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

2 Sunny House, 16/18 Mereweather Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001

+91 22 2202 3030/ 3434/ 3636

www.galeriems.com,info@galeriems.com

Mondays – Fridays: 10 am – 6:30 pm, Saturdays: 11 am – 4 pm