Vadehra Art Gallery presents Jayashree Chakravarty’s solo exhibition If you will stay close to nature… . The exhibition marks Chakravarty’s comeback to Delhi; the Kolkata-based artist’s previous solo exhibition in Delhi was held in 2003.

Chakravarty’s recent body of works has been inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s collection of ten letters, named Letters to a Young Poet. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from one of the letters, in which Rilke writes, “If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

Nature as a subject for artistic expression and philosophical quests has been Chakravarty’s major preoccupation. Her body of 16 works, mostly generated in oil and acrylic , named as ‘Weeds’, ‘Aquatic plants’, ‘Shallow water’, ‘Local Habitat’, ‘Siddhasna’, ‘Moods of water’ etc, voice her concern about shifting environmental balance and mutating relationship between human and nature, provoked by soulless and aggressive urbanization.

Words and images share a symbiotic equation in Chakravarty’s process of formulation, therefore listening to the artist is as important as viewing her works. Chakravarty’s artworks have always played mediator for conversation between the artist and nature, where the latter is an all-inclusive recognition, bearing everything the artist perceives around her. She has always been very mindful while observing and noting down tiny changes in the ‘world’ around her through her images. Her technique of building up layers through oil and acrylic paints on a thoroughly prepared ground is tried and true; one that has helped her to retain proliferated meanings through both individual and constellated images and create complete harmony with her layered thoughts, memories and inferences.

If you will stay close to nature… is a very personalized yet ecumenical documentation that needs to be excavated and explored through layers of colors and contours.

Image: © Jayashree Chakravarty
Courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery