Jamini Roy: A Painter Who Revisited the Roots

Jamini Roy: A Painter Who Revisited the Roots explores the remarkable career of the maestro from the late 1910s till his very last days. It closely examines not only the steep bends of Roy’s art that culminated in his signature style, but also the very process through which he reconnected with his indigenous rootedness. It engages in detail with the influence that various forms of folk art wielded over him. However, Roy’s located identity was mediated by the contemporary Modernist idiom, and the elements in his uniquely Bengal-based visual narratives are underpinned by a conscious intention to simplify, abbreviate, and thus reveal the essential, ‘significant’ form. It also addresses the plural lines of conflicts that underlie the very making of his art—between the urban and the rural, local and the global.