Emami Art opens its new season with The River in the Sky, a solo exhibition by the veteran abstract artist and pedagogue Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri, running from 29 August to 18 October 2025. The show, his second major presentation at the gallery, traces the artist’s long engagement with abstraction across two pivotal moments in his career: his drawings on paper from the late 1980s and the luminous recent paintings created at Santiniketan.
Born in 1944, Karchaudhuri is widely regarded as one of India’s most versatile abstractionists—his practice extending across painting, graphic art, textiles, and design. Unlike many of his contemporaries who began with figuration before turning to abstraction, Karchaudhuri moved straight into non-representational language after graduating in Applied Art from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata in 1966. His subsequent training under Finnish designer Helena Perheentupa at NID, Ahmedabad, and his exposure to American Abstract Expressionism during his stint at San Jose State University in the 1980s, profoundly shaped his approach to colour, form, and space.
Yet, Karchaudhuri’s abstractions are never placeless. They are deeply embedded in memories of rural Bihar, where he worked at the Weavers Service Centre through the 1980s, and later in his decades-long teaching and living experience at Santiniketan. His Barari Women series (1985–87), developed during his Bhagalpur years, demonstrates how local tribal traditions and rural life informed his turn towards brighter, bolder colour fields, an evolution from his earlier monochromatic palette.
If those works channeled the energy of Bihar’s distinctive cultural rhythms, his recent canvases speak the quiet atmosphere of Santiniketan—the expansiveness of its red earth, landscapes, and moods. The titular series The River in the Sky (2025) exemplifies this sensibility: sparse, almost minimalist compositions where triangles and playful washes of colour evoke the vastness of sky and horizon—without depicting them representationally.
“Karchaudhuri’s abstract language draws deeply from lived experience—of places, people, and cultural memory,” said Richa Agarwal, CEO of Emami Art, on the occasion. “His ability to create mood and atmosphere through minimal elements is both striking and deeply moving.”
The shift of focus from his textiles, showcased in The Dream of an Idiot (Emami Art, 2023), to the pursuit of abstraction in this show, also underlines a recurring concern in his oeuvre: bridging lived realities with their distillation into pure form.
Across six decades, Karchaudhuri has held solo shows at institutions including Jehangir Art Gallery (1998), San Jose State University Gallery (1985), and Kala Bhavana (2016). His works have traveled widely, from the Royal College of Art, London to the British Textile Biennial (2023), and recently featured at Art Mumbai and India Art Fair. Alongside his own practice, he has been a transformative pedagogue—teaching at NID in the early 1980s before joining Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, where he nurtured generations of textile and design students until 2009.
Exhibition Details
- Title: The River in the Sky – Solo Exhibition of Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri
- Dates: 29 August – 18 October 2025
- Venue: Emami Art Gallery, Ground Floor, Kolkata
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