Between Body and Imagination - Shovin Bhattacharjee's Inner Quest

This solo exhibition, at Dhoomimal Art Gallery, featuring artist Shovin Bhattacharjee’s art work done over a period of the last four years, is an amalgamation of the artist's thematic concerns. Having planned to host a solo in 2019, the artist had to postpone his show due to lockdown of the first and second waves of the dreaded COVID 19 pandemic. The artist however emerges from the shadows to celebrate humankind's ability to overcome adversary and survive despite the challenges.

Hailing from the ‘Abode of Clouds’, Shillong, the picturesque hill station that is also the capital of Meghalaya, in the northeastern part of India, artist Shovin Bhattacharjee (b-1976) had a bit of a ‘culture shock’ when he moved to New Delhi in the early 2005, to settle in the metropolis. “I had never seen so many towering buildings and the way the city was crowded with people, busy with life, in every corner of these structures, made me feel a bit overwhelmed,” recalls the artist. “I was both attracted and repelled by it,” he adds.

However, the metaphor of the sky-scraper as seen from a birds-eye-view, became a recurring motif in his artwork, and now one associates it with his artistic lexicon. He often organizes these cuboid structures in a spherical shape, that then becomes a metaphor for the world, since he plays with in the dark prophecy that the world would soon be covered by buildings and much of nature would disappear. He does however hope, like the family of birds that built a nest at the top of one of his large outdoor sculptures, that ‘nature finds a way to co-exist’, with this metallic and concrete world.

Interestingly, he portrays himself within his compositions. “I often find that many of my viewers and patrons actually look for my-self portrait within my work, whether it is my sculptural-installations, my paintings or digital work. If I present a work where I am not there, they ask me, Shovin where are you? I feel the artist is always a part of their art but using the self has now become ‘a metaphor’, for it is not just symbolic of myself but it also represents the ‘others’. The Common Man, can connect immediately to my work and my situation where I am engaging with my surroundings to discover the mystery of life,” says the artist philosophically.

Shovin is an artist who expresses himself across mediums and metaphors, whether it is his sculptures, installations, paintings or even his digital work that manifest these days as popular NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) which he began creating long before it became a craze as it is today. Having trained to be a painter with a B.F.A and M.F.A in Painting from Fine Arts Department, Assam University. Bhattacharjee has always believed in artistic freedom to express himself in different mediums. Each work is built up meticulously with detailed preparation and a sharp focus on the underlying thematic content rather than just the plastic qualities of the medium. Ultimately it is the message that is paramount to the artist.

The Artist at Work:
To create his sculptures Shovin prefers to work in the medium of stainless steel, aluminum and wood. “Stainless steel is a medium that I enjoy working with even though it is very demanding and unforgiving. Unlike bronze that may be melted and recast and reused, in stainless steel, when one makes a mistake, one usually has to junk the entire piece and start afresh. Which is why one has to work meticulously with lots of precision and planning,” says Shovin who works with a selected team of technicians to create his larger sculptural pieces. Like most sculptors, he usually creates the sculptural piece as a small sized maquette and then works on the large piece overseeing the technicalities of it with his team.

The sculptural works and installations usually capture the artist’s self-portrait interacting with the cuboid structures that are a metaphor for the city. Often, he is seen balancing out the structures in different compositions, literally ‘taking the weight of the city’ upon his shoulders. Like for instance in one of his Untitled high-relief sculptures, he appears to be lifting up the structures, in others he is meditating calmly on a sphere even while being surrounded by the thorny structures.

Shovin’s paintings are primarily created in acrylic and charcoal on canvas. Thematically they deal with animal life engaging with urbanity. For his recent series he also uses the trope of mirror imagery where the image of the tiger, leopard, zebra or civet cat is split into two beings located on either side of the canvas with the sprawling city between them. In another work he humorously uses the self as an onlooker, where a tiny image of the self is balanced on a large eyeball (that may also serve as a metaphor for the world) holding a pair of binoculars for viewing. Another image of the self, balances the eyeball from the bottom. Dramatically all he sees, reflected back in the eye, are the rows and rows of buildings and this serves as his humorous yet dark warning of our over-populated concrete cities.

Finally, while speaking about his Digital works, from which he creates NFTs, Shovin indicates that creating digital work takes as much effort and dedication as it does to paint or sculpt. “I began working in digital format with my camera and computer, as early as 2002, even before I moved to New Delhi,” avers the artist. There was this misrepresentation that digital artwork is just about cut and paste, but I think that is changing now. People are beginning to understand that it takes as much creativity to create a digital image, whether it is from a photograph or works that you have made in 3-D in photoshop. When PHD students approach me to study about the digital world created by artists and popularized by NFTs, then I begin to feel that people are taking it seriously even in the academic circle at long last,” says the artist with a sense of relief.

In works like Galaxy on Earth, Shovin uses the metaphor of the hand-pulled rickshaws, rendered in white to give them a sense of purity, surrounded by fiery red shaped balls that appear almost demonic. One can see that he has created an entire composition based on the plight of the common man, the lowest ‘denominator’ on the rung of society, the rickshaw-puller who was quite crushed by the weight of deprivation with little or no access to basic facilities.

One can gauge that the artist has his heart in the right place when it comes to speaking about the dispossessed, whether it is humankind, wildlife or the world at large. For he believes that in a post-covid scenario we all can have a little more compassion in our approach. “The world has changed after COVID. Nature itself has taught us that we cannot ignore our surroundings to the point that it endangers our lives,” says the artist. He also believes that ironically the digital and virtual world did help us survive the pandemic by keeping connected to each other and gave us hope for the future.
- Georgina Maddox