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AMITAVA
Amitava, one of the most well known Indian abstract painters, was born in Delhi in 1947 and studied drawing and painting at the Delhi College of Art. He has exhibited extensively in India and abroad, and through the years his artworks have undergone a significant transformation. Amitava's early abstract representational idiom has given way to a more abstract geometric language. In his most recent works he emphasizes color squares and geometrical layouts that visually recall Piet Mondrian's compositions. However Amitava's canvases are filled with textures and pigments that reverberate with Indian atmospheres and his rich and tactile fields of colors resemble Indian textiles. The intersecting and overlapping of forms betray a deep reflection upon the changing nature of the phenomenal world, while his vertical sequencing captures the steady passage of time. Amitava Das' color textures are densely populated by micro- organism and buds, dots and seeds that flow through the canvas like evanescent aggregates of life. The drama and darkness of existence find its expression in the arid figures reduced to contorted mechanism, almost skeletons of reality that reveal the skilled hand of the draftsman. Amitava's works powerfully capture the unity that emerges from multiplicity, the stability that derives from the overcoming of conflicts, and the continuity of life.
