Chitra Bichitra! চিত্র বিচিত্র ! चित्र विचित्र!

Aparna Sarkar and Pallavi Sen

March 9 - April 13, 2023

“Chitra Bichitra! চিত্র বিচিত্র ! चित्र विचित्र!” brings together Aparna Sarkar and Pallavi Sen for an exhibition of new paintings, works on paper and ceramics at Peep. Both artists are Indian and half-Bengali; the title loosely translates in these languages to mean “beautiful/eye-catching images.” They make patterns and shapes from a collective and varied understanding of South Asian aesthetics, with two distinct approaches to care on a painted surface: Sen’s sensuous and crisp watercolors play against Sarkar’s clotted and scraped oil paintings and ceramics. 

Sarkar and Sen meet in this show from opposite sides of diasporic, artistic experience. Sen, raised in New Delhi and Bombay and living in Massachusetts, sees painting as a way to take part in the crafts she honors, like bricklaying and textile weaving. She bases images and colors on their real counterparts, using recognizable combinations like cobalt and rust. Borders compound in Sen’s paintings, as they do where she grew up; pattern becomes structure and, in her largest work “After Carl Klewicke’s Quilt,” the center. She is called towards crafts like American quilting, connecting them to the ethos of craft and art that used to surround her. Sarkar, US-born and raised, is directly examining Indian patterns and family textiles in her work for the first time. Sarkar thinks of painting these patterns, which she grew up wearing and seeing at home or when visiting family, as a connection to her ancestry through her intuitive drawing hand. She weaves them into her paintings in different ways: they creep across the space and collide, net-like, or become the subject, like in “Sari (Double Ikat)”, lovingly rendered from her mother’s sari. Her ceramics, which reference architecture by nature of material, combine these patterns with more playful, memory-driven colors and symbols.