Anindita Bhattacharya

Anindita Bhattacharya (b. 1985) received both her B.V.A and M.V.A in Painting from Faculty of Fine Art, M. S. University of Baroda in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Her participations include Revisiting Beauty Threshold Art Gallery (2016), Contemporary Shahnamah Millennium Painting Exhibition: National College of Arts, Lahore and at the The Prince’s Foundation Gallery, London (2010). She attended a workshop in Mughal and Persian Miniature painting at the Prince’s Foundation, London (2017). She has been a recipient of awards like “Lt Milind Madhukar Bhade” Gold Medal (2009), “Narendra Gajanan Bhatt” Gold Medal awarded by Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda (2009), Nasreen Mohamadi Award (2006, 2009), Rajasthan Lalitkala Akademi Award for the year (2005 & 2009).

The artist lives and works in Gurgaon. India.

The cosmopolitan universe of Anindita privileges a period in Indian history known for its syncretism but it does not shy away from referencing myriad sources with wicked fun. They range from medieval Gothic gargoyles to Turkish monsters of Siyeh Qalam to skeletal chamundi figures from the Punjab hills. Hamza-nama to Harry Potter all are fair game in her work. The aesthetic trope of her vocabulary allures and encourages the viewer to travel through centuries of the history, cultures and traditions but they are all marshalled to hold a mirror to contemporary realities; the fraying of our syncretic tradition, the disquiet of a world torn asunder with rhetoric laden with violence, emergence of democratic polity that pampers majoritarianism unabashedly. This paradox is the central leitmotif of Anindita’s oeuvre.

The tug of war between the beguilingly seductive surface and the coded messages embedded in them adds to the allure of her work.

As she explains,"I started using jalis to control the gaze of the viewer so you can play hide and seek- to control what I wanted the viewer to see, and basically to bring the viewer closer because it's something hidden and this intrigues you to come closer and have a look at it. If someone doesn't want to look for it, then you miss it but if you're really interested you come closer and then the painting sort of reveals itself in layers upon layers.

Visually what drew me to Mughal and by extension Persian miniatures was the ornamentation and absorption of patterns within the composition, which still remains integral to my work. Ornamentation according to me is universal across cultures. I believe patterns can create bridges between time, traditions and cultures, therefore forming a universal, global language. For me, ornamentation is no longer benign but conflicting in more than one respect, their purpose is not mere decoration, though they appear to create harmony, on a closer glance one might observe that they tell a story of subtle violence and chaos."