Gallery Espace presents a solo show of recent works by Tanmoy Samanta (born 1973). The artist completed his bachelors and masters degree in fine arts from Kalabhawan, Santiniketan in 1996. He is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, New York in 2003.

Known as a painter of the Shantiniketan tradition (whose traces are present here through references to both Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore) in “All I Have Learned and Forgotten,” his third solo show at Gallery Espace. Tanmoy’s new body of work expands into 3-D materials and the conceptual territory of magical realism. The objects he uses the most often—maps and clocks, books, keys and locks— tantalize the viewer with evocations of space, time memories and secrets, but the form and function of these objects no longer conforms to the expectations of habit and memory.

Tanmoy collects old keys that open no locks, locks that are no longer capable of securing anything, watches that keep no time, old books that have spent the knowledge contained in them, in flea markets and street shops in lost alleyways. These objects are transformed into motifs that appear often in his work. In the artist's words, “"This new body of work includes three-dimensional books. I see these books as a form, both as artifact and as medium. As if the form in the paintings re-invented itself into the shape of a book. I used old books, gluing the pages together, layering it with rice paper, excavating shapes out of the paper, adding objects until the final object is a book only in that the covers are opened to reveal another universe held within them. It becomes a process of metamorphosis as their old identity and content no longer existed."

-Gallery Espace

Image: © Tanmoy Samanta
Man Holding Void
2013
Gouache on rice paper
30 x 43in