Galerie Steph presents Sharmistha Ray with her first ever Singapore solo exhibition Sweet Surrender: Studies in Abstraction. Having concluded an extremely successful exhibition in New York this November, Ray, who is currently based in Mumbai, is excited to show her series of abstract paintings made between 2006 and 2013.

Sweet Surrender comprises of recent paintings that canvas Ray’s concern with the interstices between abstraction and figuration to return again to the idiomatic landscape as primary subject. Her paintings take multiple layers of paint, built up over time, until the surfaces vibrate with color and impasto. These works can take months, sometimes even years, to arrive in their final state. They not only reveal a trajectory of formal and conceptual concerns that highlight the interplay between natural and organic forms and phenomena like flowers, gardens, rain, monsoon, fire, water, but also their deeper, more philosophical roots that point to the fragmentary, and transitory, nature of experience.

A collective series of events, moods and spaces together form a mnemonic archive for the spirit of a place. Often, Ray re-works older studio paintings so that the original paintings become part of the ‘history’ for further inflections into abstraction. The thick layers of paint on Ray’s canvases stand in for human skin, crackling and wrinkling, streaking and coagulated; at times, appearing as a cloak of armor, and at other times, scraped down to the bones. Ray employs color plenteously, and her capacity to assimilate and diversify complex color harmonies is reflected in The Meandering Road (2012); the densely tapestried surface of this painting further recalls the interlocked patterning schemes of various Indian textile traditions.

Paintings like The Violet Sea (2013) and Through Palm Fronds (2013) further the investigation of materiality and abstraction, inflecting meditative states through imagistic suggestions of sea and palms, both common features of Ray’s environment in Mumbai. Her painterly drive is expansive and experimental and in quivering between the poles of image and meaning, she opens up myriad new possibilities, personal, narrative, conceptual and painterly.

Ray was born in Kolkata, and lived in the Middle East before moving to the United States. She studied fine art and art history at Williams College and Pratt Institute and is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including a commission for the Mont Blanc Young Artist Worldwide Patronage Program (2012), a TED Fellowship (2009) and Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant (2004). She has had solo exhibitions in Mumbai and New York and her works are in private collections in India, America, Italy, Singapore and Australia.

-Galerie Steph

Image: © Sharmistha Ray
Through Palm Fronds
2013
Oil on canvas
153 x 153cm