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April , 2002 New York- Bose Pacia Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new works by
Jayashree Chakravarty April 11th through May 25th 2002. The gallery is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in the Chelsea district of New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12-6pm and by appointment. There will be an opening reception on Thursday April 11th from 6 to 8pm. The public is invited.
Composed of works created expressly for Bose Pacia, Jayashree Chakravarty's second exhibition in New York City (The Drawing Center, 1998) is a stunning display of her grace and daring as a painter and craftsperson. Seven large canvases and one monumental paper scroll enliven the gallery with a playfulness and mystery, showering the viewer with an inescapable sense of fancy and nostalgia for work so subtly and beautifully composed.
The work alights, motivating and alarming the viewer while the subjects, blessed by virtue of a relationship impossible for those outside the frame frolic, pine, and play. Hidden behind layers seemingly made of precipitating cloud, boys and girls splash in the resultant puddles. Angels alight in a thicket of trees, their halo's beacons through the tangled bramble. Lines in the way of architecture present themselves, marks made on canvas twist and shape sometimes into gates or roads, or sometimes nothing. Fences appear and disappear with alarming dexterity, increasing the previously innocuous dis-ease.
Artist/curator Peter Nagy says of Chakravarty, "Her springboard is the landscape, both the natural changes in palettes which occur with the seasons and the violence which man has wrought upon the land." And within this confrontation sits too a longing. Figures lose themselves within the surface, scratching forward, trying to participate. To reconcile some unknown loss with their ethereal surroundings and confusing position. Do they sit in the foreground or the background? And what is their role within the frame, as a subject, as an incident? If anything, her canvases are an invitation to mystery. Be it the mystery of a child or the mystery of the divine. What is always the case with a mystery however is true here. That they are always much easier to enter than to leave.
Jayashree Chakravarty was born in Khoai (Tripura), India in 1956, and received her BFA from Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan and her MFA from Maharaja Sayajrao University in Baroda. Along with her formal studies in India she engaged in a two-year residency at the Ecole d' Art in Aix-en-Provence, France. She has held numerous solo exhibitions in India, Europe, and the United States, and participated in group exhibitions throughout the world.